Oct 022026
 


Hieronymus Bosch St. John on Patmos 1489


• Supertanker Ablaze After Iran Attack In Hormuz (ZH)
• CNN’s Data Guru Just Dropped Brutal Numbers for the Democrats (Margolis)
• Canada Has A Ukrainian Blindspot (Ted Snider)
• Ukraine Hit By Severe Power Cuts After Russia Pounds Grid (ZH)
• Canada And Britain Blame Trump, Putin, And ‘White Supremacy’ (J.B. Shurk)
• A Lone Voice Of Sanity On NATO’s Eastern Flank Emerges (ZH)
• In the USA the Criminal Justice System Commits More Crimes than Criminals (PCR)
• Hegseth Unveils “Project Meridian” (ZH)
• ADP Jobs Report Confirms 90,000 New Jobs (Eskeldson)
• Sen. Kennedy Dogwalked Jack Smith at Senate Hearing (Matt Margolis)
• Paramount Deal Approved Hours Before $7 Million-a-Day Fines Kick In (Green)
• My Last Conversation with Charlie Kirk (John Solomon)

 

 

 

 


Trump doesn’t want that war. He may have no choice. Time is running out.

• Supertanker Ablaze After Iran Attack In Hormuz (ZH)

Iranians are apparently going back on the offensive, after it’s been widely reported that US-protected oil transit through the Strait of Hormuz has been fast gaining steam. Iran state media says a supertanker is burning off the coast of Oman after coming under Iranian attack: Local sources reported that a 2.5 million barrel capacity supertanker that was traveling through the Strait of Hormuz illegally was hit 8 kilometers off the coast of Oman and is burning, reports Fars.


Earlier we reported that starting in mid-August (on Aug. 16), Iran’s Supreme National Security Council set October 1 as a deadline. It warned at the time that if Washington failed to lift its naval blockade of Iranian ports within 45 days, Tehran could resume attacks against US forces, and by implication step up attacks on foreign shipping. Iran’s 45-day deadline for the United States has now expired. That deadline has now passed, potentially adding another layer of uncertainty to an already tense confrontation where Tehran may decide it must act ‘preemptively’ while facing more bombs by Trump (likely after the midterms).

* * *

Signs of potential major escalation, or the next round at least (which Trump has hinted will come after the midterm elections), just hit The Wall Street Journal, and sent oil prices soaring. A quick summary: The Pentagon is sending a third aircraft-carrier strike group and additional Marine Corps ships to the Middle East, adding 9,000 to 10,000 more troops to the region.

The ships, jet fighters, Marines and sailors will arrive in the region by the end of November, as President Trump considers renewing strikes on Iran after the midterm elections. The additional servicemembers will add to the more than 50,000 troops already in the region, with the deployments coming after Trump rejected Iran’s latest proposal for a seven-day ceasefire. The Trump administration is deploying a third aircraft carrier to the Middle East along with additional Marines, an American official also told Israeli media on Thursday. And later, in the afternoon, Trump posted a new Truth Social message as follows:


The USS Theodore Roosevelt is en route to US Central Command’s (CENTCOM) area of operations after having just left San Diego this week. It is expected to relieve the Japan-based USS George Washington, which entered regional waters in mid-August.

Read more …

The Dems are very optimisticc. I don’t see it. They can get people to be anti-Trump. But in the ballot-box, you must pick a name, and anti-Trump is not a name..

• CNN’s Data Guru Just Dropped Brutal Numbers for the Democrats (Margolis)

Confidence that Democrats are going to sweep the House and Senate this November is as high as it’s ever been. Pundits treat it as a done deal, and the polls seem to back them up.But not everything may be as it seems.


As I previously reported, Frank Luntz, a pollster who is no fan of President Donald Trump, sees a messier picture. Voters are souring on both parties heading into the midterms, according to Luntz, but the Democrat Party is in worse shape. Its turnout advantage is only about two points. That’s thin, since the party out of power usually enjoys a big edge in a president’s first midterm election. Luntz told CNN on Monday that everything comes down to whether Trump’s voters show up. They turned out in force when Trump was on the ballot in 2016 and 2024. In 2018 and 2022, when he wasn’t, they stayed home.

That’s a striking admission from someone who has never been a Trump fan. But there’s another factor to consider: the historic underestimation of the GOP in the polls. It happened in Trump’s first term, and if it happens again the same way, Republicans will hold the Senate. But you don’t have to take my word for it. That’s CNN’s Harry Enten talking.

Enten, CNN’s chief data analyst, explained on CNN News Central Wednesday that if the polls are wrong the way they have been historically in the Midwest, the GOP holds the Senate. “We’ve had really good Democratic polls coming out from Ohio, Michigan, Iowa,” Enten said. “And, you know, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me four times, I just have to ask the question, could it happen again?”

Could it? In major 2024 races, Republicans beat their September polling by nine points in Iowa, six in Ohio, and five in Michigan. Democrats’ leads in those states right now are smaller than those misses. “So, you look at this and you go, you know what, maybe we should just hold on a second here because we’ve seen this dance before and it was not a dance that Democrats like when the votes were actually cast and counted,” Enten explained.

Berman raised the obvious objection. Trump was on the ballot in 2024, so what happens in a year when he isn’t? Enten had the answer ready. In 2018, Trump’s first midterm, the GOP outperformed its September polls by six points in Iowa, six in Ohio, and eight in Michigan. Look across 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2024, and Republicans beat their September numbers by at least five points in all three states every single time.

Then Enten laid that history over this year’s Senate map. If Republicans outperform their Midwest polls the way they did in 2018 and 2024, Michigan, Ohio, and Iowa all go red. Even if Democrats could carry Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Alaska, we would still end up with a 50-50 Senate, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote. And does anyone really believe Texas is electing James Talarico?

“So, if history holds in terms of the GOP outperforming their September polls, well, there’s a very, very strong chance that Republicans hold on the United States Senate, even if Democrats win in places they don’t historically win in, like Texas,” Enten said. “In these midwestern Senate races, yes, Democrats have gotten good polls,” Enten noted. “But I would just say, hold on just a brief second here because history says, you know what, it might not end for them as well as the polls currently suggest it will.”


Put Luntz’s warning next to Enten’s data, and the picture for November looks a lot brighter for the GOP than the headlines suggest.

Read more …

The main Ukrainian blindspot of course is Chrysria Freeland. This doesn’t even mention her.

• Canada Has A Ukrainian Blindspot (Ted Snider)

On September 10, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky landed in Canada where he and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney signed a 100-year partnership “elevat[ing] the relationship between their countries into a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership and confirming their aligned nature.”


Canada already has a special relationship with Ukraine. Before the war, Canada had the largest Ukrainian community in the Ukrainian diaspora with 1,209,805 Ukrainian-Canadians. Canada is the fifth largest financial contributor to Ukraine after only the United States, the European Union, Germany, and the United Kingdom with over $16 billion in military, financial and humanitarian aid.

Carney said that “Canada will always stand in solidarity with Ukraine” and that “there is no qualification to our commitment.” There is little wrong with that: Ukraine was invaded by Russia and taken advantage of by the West. But there are two problems with the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. The first is practical.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Canada has contributed $8.5 billion in military support to Ukraine. The Comprehensive Partnership includes a joint declaration on defense and security co-operation. During the official visit, Carney announced new investments to support Ukraine’s defense, including $350 million for interceptor missiles for air defence.

The practical problem is that Ukraine is black hole into which money intended for defense disappears. This is a problem well known to Ukraine’s partners who, nonetheless, keep pouring money in with a blind eye to the problem. Earlier this month, following close on the heels of a U.S. $100 billion European Union loan to Ukraine, Kiev surprised the European Union with a request for an additional $27 billion to address a shortfall that was difficult to explain. The request “unsettled” European officials, some of whom privately worried “whether money is being spent efficiently or whether needs are being overstated.”

A recent New York Times investigation found that seven of Ukraine’s ten top military contractors continued to be awarded contracts after Kiev knew they were facing investigations for fraud, corruption, or failure to deliver on deals they were paid for. Eighteen companies won contracts despite defaulting on previous ones. Millions were thrown away by inexplicably, and conveniently, awarding contracts to the highest bidder. Government audits show that in one year of the war alone, Ukraine lost $1.2 billion in U.S. foreign aid to “fraud, waste and mismanagement.” Sending hundreds of millions more to Ukraine sounds great. But to whom will it go?

There is a second problem with the 100-year Comprehensive Partnership that is deeper. Carney said the Strategic Partnership is based on the two countries “aligned nature.” But there are important aspects that do not align. Canada is a federalist country that officially recognizes more than one culture and language. The Carney administration recently walked away from negotiating a trade agreement with the United States partly in defense of its sovereign right to protect French culture, French language, and its official bilingualism.

Ukraine has been locked in a civil war since 2014 to protect the opposite: a monist vision of Ukrainian society that rejects federalism and recognizes only one culture as Ukrainian while suppressing the language, culture, and religion of ethnic Russian citizens of Ukraine in Crimea, the Donbas, and the southeast. It specifically denies the pluralist alternative that is a defining feature of Canadian identity. Rather than aligning in their natures, in this essential aspect, the two countries are the antithesis of each other.

Canada has confronted this blind spot before. In 2023, Yaroslav Hunka received two standing ovations in Canada’s Parliament as “a Ukrainian Canadian war veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians” and as “a Ukrainian hero and a Canadian hero,” despite having served in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of Adolf Hitler’s SS.Carney insisted that “Canadians understand in our bones the importance of your struggle” and explained that the reason “there is no qualification to our commitment” to Ukraine is “because your cause—freedom, democracy, sovereignty—is our cause.”

It may be “our cause,” but the historical record is less clear that it is their cause. Zelensky has formally banned eleven opposition parties, including the Opposition Platform for Life party that was once the second largest party in the Ukrainian parliament, though they all condemned Russia’s invasion and contributed to Russia’s defence. He has restricted freedom of information, unifying all television sources into a single source of television news, and increased the censorship powers of the state over print and online media.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Ukraine’s largest denomination, has been banned by Zelensky though Ukraine’s constitution protects freedom of religion, the church ended all canonical ties with the Russian Orthodox Church in May 2022, and the Primate of the UOC expressed the church’s loyalty to Ukraine and condemnation of Russia’s invassion.

Cultural and linguistic rights for minorities have fared no better than political and religious rights and freedom of expression. Pursuing the monist interpretation of Ukraine, Zelensky has gone down a path of abolishing any hint of Russian culture. Legislation has erased the Russian language, making Ukrainian the sole language of government, schools, universities, culture, publishing and media.

It is fine for Canada to “stand in solidarity with Ukraine.” But we should not be blind to Ukraine’s struggles and challenges. If Ukraine is to avoid civil war after the war with Russia and if Ukraine is to have a chance of joining the European Union and orienting toward the west, they, too, are going to have to confront these challenges.

Read more …

Russia will make it a hard winter.

• Ukraine Hit By Severe Power Cuts After Russia Pounds Grid (ZH)

Ongoing major Russian strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure have resulted in significant forced power cuts across various regions of Russia ahead of what promises to be a frigid winter.National grid operator Ukrene rgo on Thursday urged consumers to limit usage following the recent attacks of the past 24 hours. The outages have chiefly impacted central Ukraine, as well as Kharkiv region in the east, along with Chernihiv and Sumy in the north.


Where security conditions currently allow, emergency repair and restoration work is already under way,” a statement said. “Energy workers are doing everything possible to restore power to all disconnected consumers as quickly as possible,” it added.And BBC reports, “Kyiv has been preparing for a renewed onslaught before winter begins, by building fifteen small scale power plants in heavily fortified concrete bunkers.” Another European outlet warns of what this means for residents going into winter:

“Kyiv said it was Moscow’s opening salvo in an expected campaign to try to knock out heating and power as winter approaches.A recent increase in strikes has prompted fears about another winter with little or no power or heating, after similar attacks last year when temperatures plunged to -20C. The strikes which started Wednesday are being called one of the heaviest combined attacks on energy cited in months. Ukrainian officials reported seven people killed as a result.”

Ukraine’s prime minister Sergii Koretskyi confirmed on X, “Russia has escalated to massive strikes on energy infrastructure.” And President Zelensky indicated that critical infrastructure was hit across five regions. Freezing temperatures are expected to hit the capital region in the coming days, as emergency repair crews scramble – though there’s unlikely to be a let-up in the nightly attacks.

Zelensky has lately floated he’d be open to another energy ceasefire deal, and these calls are likely to be renewed; however, it will have to go both ways and the Ukrainians have also been unrelenting in their long-range drone attacks on Russian territory and oil refineries. Russian forces have also of late been systematically degrading and destroying data centers and mobile providers in Ukraine. Internet connectivity has become a problem throughout various sectors of the country.

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“Carney and Burnham are Dumb and Dumber.”

• Canada And Britain Blame Trump, Putin, And ‘White Supremacy’ (J.B. Shurk)

Commie Canada and the dis-United Kingdom should be renamed the “Dumb and Dumber” of the British Commonwealth.


King Charles III’s North American prime minister, Mark Carney, ran to The New York Times last week to talk about his military combat preparations against the United States in the event that President Trump crosses Lake America and liberates Canada from its delusional leaders. What a showboating dunce. The U.S. singlehandedly sustains Canada’s economy and national security, yet the tiny central banker huffed and puffed in a hilariously Napoleonic display of fake strength.

In the same interview with the failing Times, Con-man Carney outlined his intent to integrate Canada’s economy with that of China and the European Union and to replace the U.S. Dollar with a China-linked global reserve currency. Rhetorically defending Canada’s sovereignty while insulting his U.S. benefactor, Little Mark Carney explained how he would subjugate his socialist nanny-state to Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping and unelected European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Mark is the global mascot for “educated” idiots everywhere.

Not to be outdone by not-so-Great Britain’s Canadian cousin, U.K. Prime Minister Poindexter (er, I mean Andy Burnham) informed the United Nations General Assembly last week that his government was constructing yet another speech-police organization (this one given the august name, “National Centre for Information Defence,” which should not be confused with the “Research, Information, and Communications Unit,” the “Government Communication Service,” the “Counter Disinformation Unit,” the “Defending Democracy Taskforce,” the “Information Threats and Influence Directorate,” the “Rapid Response Unit,” the “National Cyber Force and Social Cohesion Taskforce,” the “Media Monitoring Unit,” or any of the other information-control agencies already mobilized across totalitarian Britain) to protect the British people from scary thoughts and words.

Burnham blamed the Russians for spreading “a narrative of decline, stoking division, and sowing despair” in the U.K. (and definitely not Westminster’s promotion of decline, division, and despair!) and promised to counteract this “information warfare” by censoring Britons’ public speech and feeding his collapsing country a steady diet of State-sanctioned propaganda. In order to beat back the Russians, Dilapidated Britain must have its very own digital Iron Curtain! Two cheers for democracy! Hip hip…who cares.

The British people are screwed. On average, their government grants settlement or citizenship to an illegal alien every single minute. These foreign nationals receive more welfare from British taxpayers than ever before. The third-world invaders (I mean, “newcomers”) use Britain’s streets as public toilets. Rather than securing the kingdom’s borders, the Home Office hands out a nine-page booklet informing mostly-Muslim men of military age that it is illegal to rape women and children while they conquer the islands.

In the last two years alone, the number of illegal immigrants (and future citizens!) arriving by boat has exceeded the size of the entire British Army! But if these outrageous facts disturb you enough to publicly express your feelings on social media, you will most likely join the roughly 65,000 Brits who have been arrested for “speech-related offenses” over the last five years. Foreign invasion? Good! Free speech? Very bad!

Apparently, the British police state also plans to imprison anyone who would rather not fight WWIII against the Russian Federation. During a recent episode of former cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg’s “State of the Nation” on GB News, one leftist-globalist commentator in favor of mass conscription argued, “We would have to lock a few people up…some of the pro-Russian voices, people saying there isn’t a threat, don’t fight for your country, don’t go to war for Burnham, we’ll have to lock ‘em up.”

Rather than responding with horror at the suggestion that his fellow Britons should be imprisoned for opposing a catastrophic war, Rees-Mogg pedantically replied, “Well, we suspended habeas corpus during the Napoleonic Wars…indeed, yes.” In another interview, Rees-Mogg nonchalantly remarked that British citizens have a “duty” to “die” for Britain in a war against Russia.

In Burnham and Rees-Mogg’s Britain, the only way to “defend democracy” is to imprison anyone who disagrees with the British Establishment and to sacrifice everyone else to the killing fields! The British Isles might as well be renamed the “Gulag Archipelago.”

Interestingly, GB News — which leans conservative — discovered last week that Britain’s media regulator, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), had covered up data showing that viewers trust GB News more than the BBC. GB News, in fact, is ranked above all other networks with regard to viewpoint diversity and impartiality. British authorities apparently did not want the public to know these inconvenient truths because the BBC is treated as an objective, trustworthy, and premier source of news (fact check: false!). In an effort to control the public’s perception of the BBC, Ofcom restricted what information the public was permitted to know. P.M. Burnham takes the “defense of information” very seriously!

How seriously? Burnham and the British government force citizens to pay for the BBC’s awful dreck whether they watch it or not! Every household in the U.K. must fork over a £180 license fee to the BBC each year. Because more households are refusing to pay the license, the government is considering the imposition of a mandatory £11-a-month Internet tax in order to keep the BBC’s fake news funded. The BBC says that the “fee is essential for maintaining the quality and diversity of public broadcasting in the UK.”

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He doesn’t want war? He’s a traitor.

• A Lone Voice Of Sanity On NATO’s Eastern Flank Emerges (ZH)

There are a few sane voices left in the EU and NATO when it comes to urging an immediate de-escalation of rhetoric regarding Russia. Still, it’s a refreshing surprise when dovish sentiment comes from a country forming part of NATO’s eastern flank in particular. “We always need to think about the worst-case scenario,” Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev has told a European defense summit while warning that seeking to impose total defeat on Russia poses real risks of nuclear war.


Radev instead urged robust diplomacy to avert such a catastrophe. “The problem is that no one is raising the question about nuclear risk. Does it exist? Maybe not, I don’t know, but this is a risk,” he stated in remarks published Wednesday.”I don’t think the war in Ukraine will end in a nuclear war but we have to be prepared for the risk.”

“We always need to think about the worst-case scenario. Are we prepared for this? Does anybody speak about risk assessment? Does it exist at all? Because we have been trying to achieve a conventional victory over the biggest nuclear power.” He acknowledged that “there is a nuclear card” which Russia would be more likely to play if it perceived itself cornered. “We need to have this into account. We cannot close our eyes (to the fact) that there are nuclear weapons on our continent, there are nuclear weapons in the arsenal of Russia.”

The Bulgarian prime minister emphasized, “And this is part of the game calculation.” What has he gotten for his sensible calls for walking back tensions with Moscow? Western mainstream media has consistently labeled him “Kremlin-friendly”. Radev still made clear in this week’s comments that he rejected “this type of speaking” [nuclear rhetoric] from the Kremlin, referring to the recent example of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who warned earlier this month that a war between Russia and Europe would be “completely different” and “very short”.


The words were widely seen as a veiled threat of deploying strategic forces against Europe.Early this week NATO leadership called out what it slammed as ‘desperate’ rhetoric on the part of the Kremlin, also at a moment of growing accusations from European officials that Moscow is engaged in sabotage against EU interests and assets.

“Russia’s use of hybrid tactics is a sign of desperation. But we will not be dissuaded from our support to Ukraine,” NATO spokesperson Allison Hart said Tuesday, adding that “we [NATO] have what it takes to defend every inch of allied territory and remain strong, ready, and able to counter any threat.”

“NATO is a defensive alliance and none of our activities or exercises pose a risk to any part of Russia,” she reiterated. “We strongly denounce the threat of force, including any irresponsible nuclear rhetoric.” Hart added: “We call on Russia to end its unprovoked war in Ukraine.” Finally some serious questioning of the narrative: Where is the proof that the ‘Russians are coming’ – or are on the brink of some kind of invasion of European states?

As for other tiny handful of EU countries which have been voices of sanity which call for dialogue with Russia, this has included:
Slovakia
Austria
Czech Republic
and Hungary (or at least, while it was previously under Viktor Orban)


Meanwhile, on Wednesday a new alarming headline has emerged connected with the Ukraine war: Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson says European weapons factories producing arms for Ukraine are legitimate military targets for Russia. Things look to grow a lot hotter before they cool off.

Read more …

Paul Craig Roberts

• In the USA the Criminal Justice System Commits More Crimes than Criminals (PCR)

Reports I have read have me inclined to believe that there have been far more wrongful arrests from AI facial recognition and flock cameras than correct arrests.


In a recent wrongful arrest US Marshalls from the Fugitive Task Force showed up in plainclothes outside a Tennessee grandmother’s home demanding that she come out with hands up. Her grandchildren and visiting neighbors saw a bunch of armed men and had no idea what was occurring. It was all the fault of a dumbshit cop in Fargo, North Dakota. The Fargo police officer issued an arrest warrant based on no evidence but his deduction from facial identity that the grandmother 1,200 miles away had committed in North Dakota eight bank fraud felonies.

The police officer made no investigation whether the Tennessee grandmother had committed bank fraud in North Dakota. He relied only on AI and on the American system of plea bargaining. The grandmother, Angela Lipps, spent about 6 months in prison until it became obvious that she had nothing to do with the crimes of which she was wrongly accused by a totally incompetent police officer who issued an arrest warrant without any investigatory evidence to back it.

Indeed, from the $10 million lawsuit Mrs. Lipps lawyers have filed, we learn that the lazy cop, Luca Heck, “misrepresented the facial recognition results and omitted material exculpatory information and his failure to corroborate Lipps’s connection to the crimes.”

I agree that AI is total excrement, and that the money spent on it is a total waste of investment funds. Only idiots of the most stupid kind would spend trillions of dollar in eliminating the need for human labor and making truth dependent on those who control the data base. But what we face here is an older problem. bPolice officer Heck reflects what happens to police when 97% of felonies are settled not by trials, but by negotiated plea bargains.

A plea bargain is self-incrimination, which is prohibited by the US Constitution. Nevertheless, plea bargains are the unconstitutional basis of 97%, according to the statistics of the US Department of Justice, of criminal convictions. The conviction is by self-incrimination, not by a jury verdict. Almost 100% of all felony inmates are imprisoned due to self-incrimination. This does not mean that none are guilty.

Self-incrimination occurs, because the cost of a jury trial exceeds the financial capability of 90% of the American population. Self-incrimination is chosen by defendants, whether innocent or guilty, also because a plea bargain conveniences prosecutor and judge by saving them time and energy, and thus results in a lighter sentence than the prosecutor and judge would impose with a guilty verdict from a jury. As it is permissible for prosecutors to withhold exculpatory evidence, hire witnesses to lie, and prohibit testimony that proves the defendant’s innocence, a fair trial is not possible in the United States. Occasionally someone gets a fair trial, but they are rare. Their rarity is why the conviction rate is so high.

Police officer Heck is a victim himself of the plea bargaining system. In 97% of American felonies the police evidence is NEVER TESTED IN TRIAL BEFORE A JURY because the plea bargain leaves the evidence against the defendant UNTESTED. Police have learned that sweating over evidence is pointless when the evidence never goes to trial. √Officer Heck assumed the case would never go to trial and would be settled with a plea bargain, so no investigation was necessary. Evidence is irrelevant in a plea bargain. For Heck and for the prosecutor, it was assumed to be an easy victory. Only in the case of Mrs. Lipps the case made no sense.

What we need to be documented is when in our history, what year, did the prospect of a fair trial become so remote that it paid to self-incriminate oneself. What happened to the US Constitution’s prohibition against self-incrimination? How has it happened that only 3% of criminal convictions in the United States of America are consistent with the Constitution’s promise of a trial by peers? Why do judges believe prosecutor and defendants when they stand before him and declare that no deal has been made?

Read more …

“Musk is baaaack. In the past week alone he attended the Trump-Xi state dinner and was slated for a White House AI lunch, and now has his first formal advisory role since DOGE. Some feuds age like milk, others like fine wine; this one appears to have aged like a Pentagon contract.”

• Hegseth Unveils “Project Meridian” (ZH)

What do you get when you put the world’s first trillionaire, the man who builds killer drones in Ohio, and a former House Speaker in a room and ask them to design the next century of warfare? According to Pete Hegseth, you get “Project Meridian.”


In a sprawling “State of the Force” address to junior officers and enlisted troops at Marine Corps Base Quantico on Wednesday, the Secretary of War announced that Elon Musk, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey and Newt Gingrich (all three were in the audience) will lead an initiative “focused on discovering, developing and fielding the weapons and systems that our children and our grandchildren will need in their lifetimes.”

“Its purpose is to creatively look to the future and identify the domains that we must conquer and capabilities we must master,” Hegseth said, adding that “the best forecasters of future conflict” do “not solely reside inside the Pentagon.”

The project will be overseen by Emil Michael, the former Uber executive who is now the Pentagon’s top technology official. Bloomberg said Hegseth offered no further details, although Axios reports that the trio is expected to deliver its findings within 120 days, in both a public and a classified version.

The Customer Asks The Suppliers What It Should Buy
One does not need to be a cynic (although it helps) to notice that two of the three people now advising the Pentagon on which “capabilities we must master” also happen to run two of the companies most likely to sell those capabilities.

Musk’s SpaceX handles national security launches and has been a public company since its blockbuster June 12 IPO, which made Musk the planet’s first trillionaire. Luckey’s Anduril, meanwhile, has gone from defense upstart to prime-in-waiting in record time: it landed a $20 billion Pentagon contract in March, followed in May by a $5 billion raise at a $61 billion valuation, and it also builds the software for Golden Dome together with Palantir. As for Gingrich… Bloomberg notes he “has written a book on technology and entrepreneurism,” which is presumably what counts as a defense credential in 2026.

Then there is the Musk comeback. More than a year after the ultimately unpopular DOGE effort and the very public falling out with Trump, which at one point had the administration weighing shutting SpaceX out of Golden Dome, Musk is baaaack. In the past week alone he attended the Trump-Xi state dinner and was slated for a White House AI lunch, and now has his first formal advisory role since DOGE. Some feuds age like milk, others like fine wine; this one appears to have aged like a Pentagon contract.


What Goldman Says About The “Affordable Mass” Pitch
To be fair, there is a real case for letting outsiders shake up how the Pentagon buys things, and few have laid it out better than Goldman’s A&D analyst Noah Poponak, who sat down with Anduril’s management in June. Goldman’s diagnosis was that the legacy defense industry produces “low numbers of expensive, bespoke assets” that are hard to scale, while Anduril designs for “affordable mass” through selective vertical integration, common components across product lines, designs simple enough to automate, and flexible factories that can switch products quickly.

The economics also explain why everyone wants in. Per Goldman, Anduril targets a near 25% total company operating margin over time and gets roughly 70-80% of its revenue from fixed-price work, well above what the traditional primes earn. Poponak also saw “early signs of progress” in Pentagon acquisition reform, including multi-year frameworks and open-testing programs such as Drone Dominance. One of the architects of the “affordable mass” model will now help write the Pentagon’s wish list, which is either the most efficient procurement reform in history or the most efficient sales pitch. Possibly both.

Goldman is also constructive on the listed drone names. In his AeroVironment notes this month, Poponak noted that funded backlog rose 37% y/y and 23% sequentially and that AVAV “has exposure to faster growing portions of the defense budget.” He pointed to demand for its LOCUST directed-energy counter-drone system (first international order: more than $50mn) and the low-cost Freedom Eagle interceptor, which offers “a significantly lower-cost alternative to traditional missile defense systems.”

Enter AutoWarCom Meridian was not the only new acronym. Hegseth also unveiled a new four-star Autonomous Warfare Command (yes, “AutoWarCom”) with “service-like authorities” over drones, AI and command-and-control. It is set to be operational by October 1, 2027. Until then, an interim effort called Project Agincourt will draw on the Defense Innovation Unit and the Drone Dominance program, pairing “operators with entrepreneurs in rapid adaptation cycles.” Existing programs such as the Collaborative Combat Aircraft and the Navy’s MQ-25 unmanned tanker are being folded in. Hegseth called it “the fastest peacetime shift in modern military history.”

The money was already lined up. As we reported in April, the Pentagon’s FY27 request seeks $54.6 billion for the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group, up from $225 million in FY26, a 243x increase that would make even a Silicon Valley VC blush. Add the $1.1 billion Drone Dominance initiative to stockpile 300,000 sub-$5,000 attack drones by the end of 2027 (which sent drone stocks soaring in May), plus the Army’s $500 million FPV award to Neros in July, and the direction of travel is pretty clear.

…So Why Are Defense Stocks Puking?
You would think a four-star command dedicated to drones, a 243x budget request and the world’s richest man drafting the shopping list would be manna for defense stocks. Instead, the SPDR S&P Aerospace & Defense ETF (XAR) is down 22% from its August 14 peak and in a bear market, and as of Wednesday it is on track for a seventh straight weekly decline, the longest losing streak since the fund launched in 2011. XAR is now down 4.1% YTD while the S&P is up almost 12%.

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“The government inflated Bidenomics, and then it became afraid of the rising prices.”

• ADP Jobs Report Confirms 90,000 New Jobs (Eskeldson)

On September 30, the ADP (Automatic Data Processing) research firm posted a jobs report confirming the creation of 90,000 new jobs in the private sector. Before that, according to Quartz, Dow Jones expected 68,000 jobs. ADP’s National Employment Report announced that “hiring accelerated for the first time since May,” with education, healthcare, and hospitality in the lead. The Trump administration added manufacturing to that group of jobs, due to a new steel plant, the largest in the state, being built in Iowa. PR NewsWire said that 54,000 new employees joined medium business teams,


The Trump administration, new jobs, and inflation
23,000 were hired onto small businesses, and 14,000 were welcomed by large ones. Most of the new jobs from the original ADP report were found in the Northeast U.S. Many people have complained about job shortages and inflation. The higher prices rise, the fewer jobs and more inflation available, the angrier we get. Political cartoons and worthless government interventions have abounded, and the inflation-plus-job-unavailability bee in the consumer’s bonnet stings him again and again. It causes work-related woes and necessity prices to rise, and candidates to make speeches about it during election time.

In a change of events, the White House website has several articles about President Donald Trump adding more jobs, making up for losses caused by Bidenomics, a well-known implementation of the former president where jobs produced great risk and little reward. More than one million private-sector jobs have been created in President Trump’s second term, while federal employment remains at its lowest share of the workforce on record.

The government inflated Bidenomics, and then it became afraid of the rising prices. Overlooking that so many businesses could have gone broke and people would have become unemployed, as employers would have been unable to pay workers, the government simply kept the inflation. Stores raised prices because the money stopped having as much value, making food, clothing, and daily life necessities very hard to obtain, if not unaffordable; Bidenomics was remembered for the infamous egg shortage taking place in the early 2020s.

However, during the new Trump administration, Open Source Zone wrote on X that the September U.S. core inflation rate dropped to 3.0%, but it was originally supposed to be 3.3%. This reduced inflation may be why the ADP report included data showing that the latest private sector employees have been paid more: a 3.2% increase in their starting salary and a 4.7% increase in “gross pay.”

The takeaway
In the new report, an ADP chief economist, Dr. Nela Richardson, said, “job creation rebounded and pay growth remained solid.” Trump possibly helped to create these new hospitality, health care, and education jobs by restructuring a system rife with monetary woes. Further, Trump played a role in reducing inflation by removing Biden administration policies that were probably using inflated monies to stay afloat, and that we taxpayers were forced to pay for.

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Seriously, this is the US Senate:

“Smith pleaded ignorance again, so Kennedy tried a different line of questioning. “You don’t know anything about that. Do you believe in the Tooth Fairy?” Kennedy asked. “I do not,” Smith answered. “How about the Easter Bunny?” Kennedy continued. “I no longer believe in the Easter Bunny,” Smith said. Kennedy then asked whether Smith thought Jimmy Hoffa died of natural causes. Smith said he didn’t.”

• Sen. Kennedy Dogwalked Jack Smith at Senate Hearing (Matt Margolis)

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) gave former Special Counsel Jack Smith an epic grilling at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday morning. Kennedy accused Smith of partisan bias, of keeping a federal judge in the dark about his pursuit of congressional phone records, and of angling for the special counsel job in the first place. Smith spent the afternoon insisting he was a paragon of nonpartisan virtue, and Kennedy wasn’t buying a word of it.


Kennedy opened by asking about Smith’s reaction to President Donald Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton. “When President Trump defeated Secretary Clinton, you were bitterly disappointed, weren’t you?” Kennedy asked. “I don’t recall that,” Smith replied. Imagine not recalling your own reaction to a presidential election. What a joke.

Kennedy then noted that Smith’s wife is an ardent supporter of Barack and Michelle Obama who made a “glowing, saccharine-sweet documentary” about the former first lady and sold it to Netflix. Smith refused to discuss his family and kept reminding everyone that he’d taken two jobs in the first Trump administration.

Then Kennedy switched gears. “You asked General Garland to appoint you special counsel, didn’t you?” He pressed. Smith looked down and scribbled on his notepad. “I don’t think that’s accurate,” he said. “He made the decision to appoint me.” When Kennedy asked whether Smith had people call then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to lobby for him, Smith scribbled some more and said he didn’t recall anything like that. Then Kennedy asked if he really wanted the job, and Smith launched into a speech about his own impartiality.

“I accepted the position as special counsel because I had spent 30 years as a nonpartisan prosecutor,” Smith claimed. “I had investigated every sort of criminal case you could possibly imagine, and I thought I was qualified to do the job. I knew that I would do it independently, and I would conduct it the same way whether it were Republican or a Democrat.” Kennedy watched him deliver that absurd claim with the patience of a man who knew exactly where this was going.


Next, Kennedy zeroed in on Smith’s pursuit of phone records belonging to members of Congress, which Smith’s team obtained through Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg. “When you went to Judge Boasberg, you didn’t even tell him you were seeking the phone records of members of Congress, did you?” Kennedy asked. “Because you knew he wouldn’t agree. He would say, ‘Hey, counselor, anybody who knows a law book from a J.Crew catalog knows that this violates the Constitution.’ But you didn’t tell him, did you?”

Smith tried twice to explain the non-disclosure orders his team sought, and Kennedy cut him off both times. Then the disgusted senator delivered the line of the day. “You didn’t tell him. But you’re unbiased. You have no personal feelings,” Kennedy said. “You make me want to throw up in my mouth.”

Another satisfying moment came when Kennedy got Smith to admit he told Garland twice that he planned to prosecute Trump. Smith said he had “absolutely no idea” whether Garland then checked with President Joe Biden. So Kennedy walked him through it, getting Smith to concede that Garland was experienced and intelligent.

“Is he a dummy?” Kennedy asked. “That was not my experience,” Smith said. “Yeah, mine neither,” Kennedy said. “So you’re telling me that you’re about to prosecute a former president of the United States — first time in history. Not only that, you’re about to prosecute a former president of the United States who’s also the current opponent of Judge Garland’s boss. And you told Judge Garland, ‘Here’s what I’m about to do.’ And you don’t think he checked with President Biden to see if it was okay?”

Smith pleaded ignorance again, so Kennedy tried a different line of questioning. “You don’t know anything about that. Do you believe in the Tooth Fairy?” Kennedy asked. “I do not,” Smith answered. “How about the Easter Bunny?” Kennedy continued. “I no longer believe in the Easter Bunny,” Smith said. Kennedy then asked whether Smith thought Jimmy Hoffa died of natural causes. Smith said he didn’t.

You have to love Kennedy. Smith has given up on the Easter Bunny, yet he still expects Americans to believe that Garland greenlit the first federal prosecution of a former president, who was also Biden’s chief political rival, without so much as a heads-up to the White House. Smith brought two federal indictments against Trump and dropped both after voters sent Trump back to the White House in November 2024.

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“Was anybody really looking forward to black lesbian Casablanca — as an eight-part limited series — if Netflix had won the bidding war?”

• Paramount Deal Approved Hours Before $7 Million-a-Day Fines Kick In (Green)

Just hours before contractual $7 million-a-day late fees kicked in on Thursday, a federal judge blessed Paramount’s $110 billion Warner Bros. buyout. Well, it’s about time. “After a fierce year-long battle,” as Variety put it Wednesday afternoon, Paramount chief David Ellison will finally complete his buyout of troubled Warner Bros. “in the most expensive takeover in Hollywood history.”


U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín oversaw the California-led, multi-state antitrust suit seeking to block the buyout or impose conditions on it. Yesterday, she put her stamp of approval on Paramount’s settlement with the 12 Democrat state attorneys general who brought the case. The merger had already been approved by the Department of Justice and even by the EU’s busy-body nanny-staters, but California Attorney General Rob Bonta saw an angle and went for it.

The suit was such a nuisance — and put so many California jobs at risk — that California Democrat gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra practically begged the Blue State AGs to call it off, or at least settle quickly. Nevertheless, the AGs seem to have gotten most of what they wanted.

I’ve written in recent months about the legal ins and outs and political maneuvers leading to this moment, and the California-led antitrust suit that, in my mind, amounted to nothing more than legal blackmail over the combined companies’ future operations. And sure enough, among the deal’s various terms, Paramount-Warner (or whatever the merged company’s name turns out to be) will be required to establish an editorial-independence board for CBS News and CNN, plus an independent compliance monitor.

Professional Hollywood scold Mark Ruffalo, who at one time was a not entirely untalented actor, blasted the court’s approval as “incredibly disappointing.” “This grassroots movement isn’t going to fade away, and neither is our resolve,” Ruffalo said to — I’m not sure, actually. “This was never about just one merger: This was about fighting back against corrupt oligarch billionaires trampling the interests of everyday people to line their own pockets.”

Ruffalo’s net worth is believed to be about $35 million, yet his most famous role was mostly CGI. So if you were on the fence about whether the deal should go through, hopefully Ruffalo pushed you over to the Yes side, if not with me out in the fields of Oh HELL Yes, about a hundred yards further down from the fence. But I digress yet once more.

As a business proposition, I remain agnostic about the merits of the buyout. This is an industry in flux, being chased out of its home city by bad governance, and the merged studios will have a lot of debt to service. How much? $80 billion. I don’t know what kind of deal Paramount might have gotten for its bonds, but an average 7% interest rate would mean $5.6 billion a year in interest alone. That’s a lot of movie tickets and streaming fees.

Still, I wish them luck. Partly because these are two storied studios that have played a big part in American culture, and if a merger prevents one or both of them from getting parted out — which was one of Warner’s possible fates — that would be wonderful. But mostly because I didn’t want to see Warner’s massive IP library become just another part of Netflix’s content-slop firehose. Was anybody really looking forward to black lesbian Casablanca — as an eight-part limited series — if Netflix had won the bidding war?

Read more …

“Freedom + Courage = Saving Western Civilization.”

• My Last Conversation with Charlie Kirk (John Solomon)

Many months later, it still looks and feels surreal when I see the video clip. Sitting in my podcast studio with headphones on, fighting back tears and uttering words I never thought would enter my mouth as a journalist.


“Charlie Kirk passed away a short while ago. He wasn’t able to survive the blood loss from the wound to his neck,” I told Eric Bolling in a special breaking news broadcast on Real America’s Voice, the upstart network that we three shared together. “There will be some announcements soon is what I’m told. And then we will have to sort through what happened today, who is responsible and try to understand.”

Just a few minutes before, I had confirmed from multiple sources that my friend — half my age but twice as visionary– had died. I triggered a bulletin on the Just the News Web site providing the first confirmation of Charlie’s death and then went on air with my stunned RAV colleagues to share the news. A short while later, President Donald Trump confirmed our report and a nation began mourning, and then debating, how a young man with charisma and passion, a beautiful loving wife and two kids could be robbed from us by the bullet of another young man driven to become an assassin solely from the apparent hatred for the beliefs Charlie spread across America’s campuses.

I’ve thought back often in the year that has ensued and asked myself, and my heavenly father above: what would Charlie say about that moment? The truth is we will never know for certain. But my final interactions with Charlie a few weeks earlier at his annual donor event in Colorado have brought me to this conclusion. Tyler Robinson is exactly the type of young American that Charlie was dying to reach with his political evangelism.

Both young men grew up in a disillusioning era of America where division was seeded and nurtured by intolerance spread at lightning speed across social media. It has been an era where hope and opportunity is being hijacked by the false prophets of democratic socialism, fake news and globalism. It’s also an era where the Western civilization value system that embraced truth, goodness and freedom and decried evil and repression is being supplanted by a new gospel of hedonism and moral relativism and Big Government idol worship spread by influencers that resemble the snake oil salesmen of the gypsy era.

Charlie chose a path toward freedom and faith and family. He saw America as eminently good, even with its flaws. He believed in fighting for it by leveraging the liberty of free speech to spur a great debate, just like Lincoln in the dark days before the Civil War.

Tyler apparently chose to embrace a different path that took him into a dark world of furryism and video game fantasy, where resentment rises in the absence of hope and faith and eventually escalates into a final act of lethal intolerance.

That dynamic has played out over and over again on the streets of America from Columbine to Coventry. Rob young people of hope and God and purpose, confuse them about everything from the righteous history of their country to the undeniable reality of their gender and they will eventually drift from family and friends and freedom and truth and eventually succumb to a moment of irreversible hatred

In the end, Charlie made his mark with a bullhorn of hope. Tyler made his with a bullet inscribed with hate. But they will be inextricably linked forever just like Booth to Lincoln during the Civil War, or Oswald to Kennedy during the Cold War. Ironically, every major struggle for freedom in American has been marred by an assassination. It’s a sobering reminder that freedom is not free and that the forces of evil that seek to extinguish liberty’s flame will resort to whatever measures necessary to succeed…

… In the pages that ensue in this book you will get to learn just how Charlie came to embrace such fearless patriotism. His intellect was large, his capacity for debate endless and his passion to ensure his generation not be erased by an evil golden calf of socialism was infectious.

Some say he can’t be replaced and that a single assassin’s bullet has ended his counteroffensive. Perhaps some of the past year feels like a drought. But as farmers know, a single good rainfall is all that’s needed to revive crops to a plentiful harvest. I hope and pray this book is that rainfall, that reading about the evolution of Charlie’s thinking and the wisdom of his words will inspire you to pick up the bullhorn of liberty and fill that void.

Every generation’s geniuses boil their thesis into a simple equation. Newton and Einstein had theirs. Charlie had his too. On the two-hop flight back from Aspen to Washington DC last August I jotted into a note my takeaway from being on stage with Charlie. For me it is the Kirk equation we must follow.’

Freedom + Courage = Saving America

Later I scribbled out America and paid homage to Charlie’s wisdom. My final inscription now reads like this: Freedom + Courage = Saving Western Civilization.

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Sep 252026
 
 September 25, 2026  Posted by at 7:49 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  36 Responses »


William Blake Europe Supported by Africa and America 1796


• Judge Temporarily Blocks Trump From Banning 3 Outlets From White House (JTN)
• You’re Not Going to Believe the Stunt CNN Pulled (Moran)
• The Funeral of CNN (Eric Florack)
• Panic At CNN As Paramount Seeks Elon Musk Equity Investment (ZH)
• CNN Insiders Are Panicking Over This Bombshell Development (Matt Margolis)
• 60 Percent of Polled Democrats Would Support a Military Coup (Turley)
• AfD Now The Most Popular Party In Key Western German State (RMX)
• Europeans Should Overthrow Their ‘Ruling Class’ (J.B. Shurk)
• Queen Ursula’s New ‘Boyfriend’ Should Make Putin Smile (Rachel Marsden)
• Canada and UK Could Merge War Chests To Fight Russia (RT)
• Trumps “Russian sanctions” Destroyed German Car Industry (Paul Craig Roberts)
• Check Out McDonald’s $13.5 BILLION Modernization Plan (Stephen Green)
• Milei Calls UN a Caste of Parasites, Signs a Major Deal with US (Anderson)
• London May Become De Jure Party To Ukraine Conflict (TASS)
• This Story of a Black Woman Found Dead by Hanging (Tim O’Brien)

 

 

https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2102895614635749632?s=20 https://twitter.com/warDaniel47/status/2102818361641980370?s=20 https://twitter.com/GlobalDiss/status/2103048705272340737?s=20

 

 


Haven’t found any Xi articles that stood out. But we know he’s here.

“Ruling restores CNN, MSNOW and Politico’s access until case is resolved.”

• Judge Temporarily Blocks Trump From Banning 3 Outlets From White House (JTN)

A federal judge ordered President Donald Trump early Thursday to restore White House access to CNN, MSNOW and Politico, temporarily blocking his bid to ban them from accessing the executive mansion. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee, said the news outlets had met the “high bar” for a preliminary injunction and that White House must “immediately return, reinstate, and restore” their access. The three outlets sued the White House earlier this week after Trump banned them from the White House over their coverage of his administration.


The lawsuit argues that presidents have long had adversarial relationships with reporters and haven’t always agreed with what the press is reporting, but the “Constitution protects the liberty and property interests that news organizations and White House reporters have in their press credentials and the access those credentials afford them to cover the White House for the benefit of the public.”

After an initial hearing Wednesday afternoon, Kelly kept the ban in place while he weighed both sides of the case but seemed skeptical of the administration’s arguments that the outlets’ coverage of the Iran war and ballroom construction could amount to a national security risk.

In the wee hours of the morning Thursday, however, he issued a ruling granting a 14-day injunction, ruling the White House needed clear standards for revoking media access and that the national security grounds cited for last Friday’s action were “so vague it hardly does the trick.”

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“After a Judge Allowed Them Back in the White House ..”

• You’re Not Going to Believe the Stunt CNN Pulled (Moran)

A Trump-appointed judge granted CNN, MSNOW, and Politico temporary access to the White House again following their banishment by Donald Trump for reporting “fake news.” The ruling granted a 14-day temporary restraining order requiring the White House to restore access for the media outlets.


U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly published his ruling early Thursday, about 1:30 a.m. ET. Just four and a half hours later, at 6 a.m., CNN reporter Betsy Klein and a photojournalist tried to enter the White House. Naturally, since the guards had almost certainly not received any guidance from the press office about the middle-of-the-night ruling, they barred Klein and the photojournalist from entry.

“There was no reason provided for the refusal,” CNN wrote on its website, “and CNN will continue to try to gain access as regular business hours start.” Another CNN producer entered the White House “after 6:00 AM,” according to the network. “It was not immediately clear why the person had been able to access the building.”

Actually, it was very clear. CNN wanted to lead its story on the judge’s ruling, making it seem like the Trump White House was defying the law. “How dare you not give entry to our journalists at 6 a.m.!” It was a transparently stupid gambit that inadvertently shows why Trump wanted to ban them. The hypocrisy is appalling.

A few minutes later, the other CNN employee was given access to the building, probably after word reached the guards at the gate that their press passes had been restored. I am not generally in favor of banning the media from anywhere. They’re going to write their story regardless of whether you hate them or not. “Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel,” Mark Twain supposedly said. Trump should follow that advice more often.

Judge Kelly cited the urgent needs of a “free press” and ordered the 78 journalists’ credentials returned for at least two weeks while further litigation plays out. He rejected the administration’s national security argument out of hand. “The Court is skeptical — at least on this record — that Defendants’ interest in safeguarding national security is the actual motivation for, or is even advanced by, the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes,” Kelly wrote in an eight-page ruling issued just before 1 a.m. Eastern.

“Nothing in the record that predates this suit suggests that the revocation of Plaintiffs’ hard passes was motivated by national security concerns. Certainly, that is not what President Trump said when he announced that he was ‘banning’ Plaintiffs from the White House — instead, he focused on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of Plaintiffs’ reporting,” the judge added.

Politico: “The judge noted that the administration provided no support for its assertion that any of the disputed stories contained classified information or actually damaged national security and said some of the reporting was months or years old, belying claims the administration’s claims of urgency by the administration. Kelly also said the White House appeared to have violated the constitutional due process rights of the journalists by failing to give them advance notice that concerns about their reporting could lead to cancellation of their passes.

Theodore Boutrous Jr., the lead attorney for the news organizations, welcomed Kelly’s order and the speed with which he issued it. “This is a strong ruling vindicating freedom of the press, due process and the rule of law,” Boutrous said in a statement. “We greatly appreciate the court’s swift action.” In addition to citing the specious national security claims, Kelly noted that the reporters had no advance warning that their press passes would be pulled.

“The ‘general rule’ is that ‘individuals must receive notice and an opportunity to be heard before the Government deprives them’ of a constitutionally protected interest,” Kelly wrote in his ruling. Trump had no chance of maintaining his ban on the media outlets. Hypocrisy isn’t “just cause” to yank a reporter’s credentials, nor are bias and inaccuracy. The First Amendment is a plain-language constitutional amendment, and case law backs it to the hilt.

Trump would have had better luck working with King Canute to roll back the tide.

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CNN gets much more attention than their numbers warrant.

• The Funeral of CNN (Eric Florack)

Turns out the real story about the most mistrusted name in the news, CNN, right now isn’t a ratings slump or a bad quarter, as important as those are to the story. It’s not even Donald Trump banning the network from the White House press room. It’s a funeral — and that’s not me reaching for a snappy headline. It’s almost the exact word being used by people who actually work there.


A Variety report published Sept. 22 describes the mood inside CNN as “like a funeral” in the wake of the settlement that clears the way for Paramount Skydance to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. And once you look at what’s actually converging on the network at once, the metaphor holds up better than most newsroom clichés do.

CNN is getting a new owner, on a short clock. Paramount Skydance is expected to complete its acquisition of WBD by early October, according to reports from KVIA — which means whatever CNN becomes next gets decided by people who didn’t build it.

Leadership is a question mark. Mark Thompson’s future at the network remains unresolved, and Fox News reports that Paramount CEO David Ellison still has to figure out how CNN fits alongside CBS News — two once-fierce competitors about to share a corporate parent, with no clear answer yet on who runs what. Attention, Bari Weiss: I’d not be spending much time unpacking just yet.

Layoffs are coming, and CNN’s own people are saying so. Brian Stelter, still on CNN’s payroll, (why I have no idea) said on air that layoffs and cost-cutting are “almost certainly” coming as Paramount hunts for efficiencies and works off the debt load from the deal, according to CNN’s own transcripts. When the in-house media reporter is narrating his own newsroom’s layoffs on air, that’s not spin — that’s a company bracing for it in real time.

And the audience problem hasn’t gone anywhere. Variety notes CNN’s linear ratings sit well below where they were during Trump’s first term, even as the company has poured effort into building out a digital subscription business to compensate. The cable-news gravy train that used to cover for everything else isn’t pulling its weight anymore.

Here’s the detail that makes the whole thing almost too perfect: this isn’t the funeral of a company hemorrhaging money. WBD had actually projected CNN would pull in roughly $600 million in profit on $1.8 billion in revenue in 2026. So nobody’s burying a corpse. They’re burying the CNN its own employees thought they worked for — the assumptions, the standing, the sense of being untouchable, all going into the ground at once, while the balance sheet, ironically, still looks fine. Traditionally, that’s the description of a company chugging along on a reputation it no longer deserves, if it ever did.

That’s the real story here, and it’s worth stating plainly: CNN isn’t being buried because it lost money. It’s being buried because the business model, the audience, the ownership, the management, and every assumption that defined the network for three decades are all getting interred simultaneously, on the same afternoon, by a company that didn’t build any of it and owes it nothing sentimental.

And the symbolism practically writes itself from here. CNN is about to join the same corporate family as CBS News — a rival network it spent decades trying to beat — while Paramount reportedly contemplates real structural changes to both operations at once. The merger settlement even mandates the creation of a joint News Editorial Independence Board covering both CNN and CBS, which Investing.com reports experts are already warning will be toothless in practice — a supervisory body built mainly to look reassuring on paper.

But now, here’s the part of the eulogy nobody at CNN wants read aloud: underneath the ownership shuffle, the layoffs, and the ratings slide sits one stubborn, well-documented fact. CNN’s left-leaning reporting is the disease. Everything else in this column is just the list of symptoms.

Start with how ordinary Americans actually perceive the network, not how CNN perceives itself. A YouGov survey from May 2026 asked Americans to rate the ideological lean of major outlets and found CNN sitting among the handful of sources most likely to be classified as liberal rather than conservative — in the same company as MS NOW and the New York Times. That’s not Fox News saying it. That’s a general-population poll.

And it’s not a partisan mirage where only Republicans see it. AllSides recently ran a blind bias survey in which participants across the political spectrum rated CNN’s content without knowing whose logo was attached to it. The result: CNN landed at “Lean Left” on their scale — and self-identified Democrats rated it Lean Left too. Independents rated it further left than that. When Democrats, independents, and Republicans all rate the same content as leaning the same direction with nobody’s brand recognition in play, that’s not a smear campaign. That’s a pattern showing up in the copy itself.

I mentioned the issue of trust in the first paragraph. And that’s the tell. The trust numbers tell the same story from a different angle. A June 2025 Pew survey found 58% of Democrats trust CNN while 58% of Republicans distrust it — a near-mirror-image split that a Center for Integrity in News Reporting event later summarized as “both sides see exactly the bias they expect to see, in exactly the outlets they already distrust.”

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Two different parties talk about panic at CNN.

• Panic At CNN As Paramount Seeks Elon Musk Equity Investment (ZH)

Paramount is weighing whether to bring Elon Musk on as an equity investor in its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, according to a report from Semafor. David Ellison has been sizing up potential investors as he works to lock down financing before the merger closes. Paramount has not said how much money it hopes to raise, and the size of any Musk investment remains undetermined. A Paramount spokesperson declined to comment, and Musk did not respond to a request for comment.


The news prompted panic inside CNN, which is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery. Staffers at the network had plenty to worry about before Musk’s name entered the conversation. Layoffs loom over the newsroom, nobody knows who will run the place once Ellison takes the keys, and now the man who took a chainsaw to Twitter’s payroll might own a slice of the operation. “Amazing it comes out now of course,” one CNN source said, pointing to the awkward timing for California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who threw his support behind the merger to keep Paramount jobs in his state. “Not good for Gavin!”

“When it rains…[it pours],” another source said. “It’s really scary given what he did at X and DOGE.” At CBS News, David Ellison installed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief after Skydance acquired Paramount, and she has drawn fierce criticism for firing longtime 60 Minutes correspondents and for how she manages the newsroom’s coverage. CNN staffers have watched that saga unfold, and they have taken notes.

Once the merger is complete, David Ellison will control HBO Max, Paramount+, HBO, CBS, CNN, and thousands of film titles. That makes him one of the most powerful figures in American entertainment, and it makes who backs him financially a matter of real consequence. Larry Ellison, David’s father and the founder of Oracle, has personally guaranteed more than $40 billion of the equity financing that makes the acquisition possible. But an investment from Musk would still carry significance.

“An investment from Musk would be a significant vote of confidence in the combined Paramount Warner Bros. from a businessman who also has a devoted retail investor following,” explained Semafor business reporter Rohan Goswami. “A check from Musk or other big financial backers would also give Paramount a more diversified investor base, and reduce Larry Ellison’s financial burden.”

The relationship between the two men runs deep in both directions. Larry Ellison invested in Tesla in 2018 and sat on its board for several years. When Musk took Twitter private in 2022, Ellison invested $1 billion in the deal. “Musk’s dollars and political influence were concerning to Democrats during the 2024 election, given his control of X,” writes Goswami. “The possibility of him having even partial ownership in CNN and CBS would likely raise alarm bells in Washington, even though it is unlikely Musk would have formal input over the company’s operations.”

The news of Musk’s potential involvement comes days after the $110 billion merger cleared its final hurdle. Paramount settled the antitrust lawsuit that California Attorney General Rob Bonta brought against the deal.

Paramount agreed to spend an additional $1.5 billion on domestic production over five years. The company must release 30 films in theaters every year, rising to 32 after the first two years, with at least 20 wide releases, rising to 21, and four independent films each year. If Paramount misses any of those targets, it must sell Miramax Studios and pay $30 million for every film it comes up short. The settlement also forces Paramount to negotiate cable deals separately and commits it to raising domestic production from 5% of all films to 20%, or even 30%, if Congress passes certain tax credits. The settlement also created a News Editorial Independence Board for CBS News and CNN, though nobody has spelled out what powers it will hold. The agreement said nothing about layoffs.

Still, for a newsroom that has spent years telling viewers to fear Elon Musk, the prospect of him buying in carries a certain poetry.

Read more …

Musk investment makes all the sense in the world.

• CNN Insiders Are Panicking Over This Bombshell Development (Matt Margolis)

According to a report from Semafor on Wednesday, Paramount CEO David Ellison has considered inviting Elon Musk into the group of investors bankrolling Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. Musk is one of several deep-pocketed names on Ellison’s list, and nobody knows yet how big a slice he’d take. But any slice at all would hand the man the left loves to hate a piece of both CNN and CBS News. You can almost hear the fainting couches creaking.


And as soon as the news hit, the freakout began. Inside CNN, staffers were already bracing for layoffs and fretting over who will run the network once Ellison takes over, sources told The New York Post, and the Musk report only fed that dread. One CNN source couldn’t resist pointing out the timing and took a swipe at Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.), who backed the merger because he feared Paramount would leave the state and take thousands of jobs with it. “Amazing it comes out now, of course,” the source said. “Not good for Gavin!”

Former CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta apparently couldn’t find any words at all:

https://twitter.com/Acosta/status/2102801600804978747?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2102801600804978747%7Ctwgr%5E19de6795ca5f981437f92c46903e0f8df1365447%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fpjmedia.com%2Fmatt-margolis%2F2026%2F09%2F24%2Fcnn-insiders-are-panicking-over-this-bombshell-development-n4957600


It’s easy to see why the newsroom is sweating. Larry Ellison, David’s father, already holds a major stake in CBS and Paramount and counts President Trump as a friend and ally. David Ellison reportedly sat down with Trump at the White House earlier this year. And, as the Post notes, there’s precedent to suggest that CNN should expect significant changes after the merger. At CBS News, Bari Weiss – who was made editor-in-chief by David after his company Skydance acquired Paramount – has faced serious blowback for axing longtime “60 Minutes” correspondents and her oversight of newsroom coverage.

Larry Ellison has supported Musk – the world’s richest person – throughout his many business endeavors, investing $1 billion in his takeover of X, formerly known as Twitter, and serving on Tesla’s board of directors for years. An investment from Musk could help boost the image of the newly-combined company in the eyes of investors, since the South African billionaire has a dedicated investor following.

And it gets better. Under its settlement with California Attorney General Rob Bonta, Paramount agreed to set up independent editorial boards for CBS News and CNN, though the company hasn’t explained what authority those boards will actually have. Now picture Musk with a seat on one of them. Better yet, both. I’d pay good money to see the faces around the table at that first meeting. And I’d love to see him walk into CNN’s headquarters with a sink.


CNN has spent the better part of a decade operating as a far-left propaganda outlet. Musk spent $44 billion to buy Twitter because he believed legacy media gatekeepers had too much power over what Americans could see and say. If even a sliver of that attitude makes it into CNN’s newsroom, the network could finally be dragged toward something resembling balance.

Grab the popcorn, because this is going to be a blast to watch.

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Democrats->Democracy-> Military coup.

• 60 Percent of Polled Democrats Would Support a Military Coup (Turley)

It appears that nothing says “saving Democracy” like a good old-fashioned military coup. A new survey from the Center for Strategic Politics found that 59 percent of Democrats would favor a military coup to remove President Donald Trump from office. All it took was four years out of power for these Democratic voters to embrace a coup d’état to negate the results of the last election. What is particularly chilling is that many of these voters still portray themselves as defending democracy by calling for a military takeover. It is akin to supporting drive-by shootings to combat gun violence. That is not the only shocker in this survey.


According to the Center, roughly six in 10 (59%) Democrats polled said they would feel “very positive” or “somewhat positive” if the US military removed Trump and seized control of the American government. The vast majority, of course, would be happy if Trump were impeached and removed from office (87%) or ousted by his cabinet via the 25th Amendment (84%).


The survey also shows the same overwhelming support for socialism in the new Democratic Party. What is surprising is the support for public ownership of industries. That includes almost half (46%) supporting public ownership and operation of grocery stores. Almost 40 percent support public ownership and operation of restaurants. (39%). I have previously said that I do not recognize the current Democratic Party as someone raised in a politically active and liberal Democratic family. I first became estranged from the party over the radical shift from a pro-free speech party to one that supported censorship and speech curtailment.

Despite many who claim that the Democratic Socialists represent a small fraction of the party, these polls show a consistent and growing majority in support of socialism. The addition of support for a military coup shows the manifestation of a rage addiction in America. Democratic leaders are now calling for trashing core constitutional institutions or values. When some of us criticized moves to pack the Supreme Court, leaders like Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom accused us of engaging in mere “nostalgia.”

It is the same “nostalgia” that leaves many of us shocked at the support for a military coup. On our 250th anniversary, we face yet again Benjamin Franklin’s warning that this is a Republic if we can keep it.

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“The AfD party has seen an incredible rise in Germany’s most populous state in the latest sign western Germans are turning away from establishment parties..

“…in a national vote..”

So far we’ve been looking at local elections..

And in the former East..

But this includes the West now.

• AfD Now The Most Popular Party In Key Western German State (RMX)

The anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is known for its strength in the east of the country, but its popularity in Western Germany is also only growing, including in the country’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia.


This latest Forsa poll points to incredible growth of the AfD in a very short time in the voter-rich Western German state. It is now the most popular party in the entire state when measuring a national vote and would earn 24 percent of the vote.


Meanwhile, the Christian Democrats (CDU) fell four points to 22 percent, the lowest value Forsa has ever recorded for the party in the state. The previous low was 23 percent in December 2021. However, in order to avoid confusion, it must be noted that the Forsa poll asked two very distinct questions. One question asked voters in North Rhine-Westphalia how they would vote at the federal level and also how they would vote at the state level. At the state level, voters in North Rhine-Westphalia would still back the CDU over the AfD; however, the CDU’s advantage over the AfD has narrowed to just seven percentage points ahead of the April state election.


For Minister-President Hendrik Wüst, the drop in support for his CDU party comes at an especially sensitive time. Wüst recently became the only top CDU politician who called for the government to begin the process of investigating a possible ban of the AfD party. He is also seen a strong contender to replace Merz as chancellor.

The latest figures show that if a state election were held this Sunday, the CDU under Wüst would receive 29 percent, down from 32 percent in Forsa’s April survey. The AfD has risen two points to 22 percent. The gap between the two parties has therefore fallen from 12 to seven points in just a few months.

About a year ago, however, the lead was far larger, at 22 percentage points. In July 2025, 38 percent of respondents favored the CDU while the AfD stood at a mere 16 percent. While this may be of some consolation to Wüst that he is still more popular than the CDU federal branch, the fact that the AfD is now leading in the state at the federal level represents a massive sea change in German politics.

North Rhine-Westphalia is one of the most diverse of all of Germany — outside of the city-states like Berlin — featuring 35 to 38 percent of the population with a migration background. It is also a state with numerous industries hit hard by Germany’s ongoing economic downturn.

The three recent state elections in eastern Germany have become a “turning point” for the CDU after a sharp setback in Saxony-Anhalt, the party’s failure to enter the state parliament in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern two weeks later, and disappointing results in Berlin. Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he was “deeply shocked” about the vote in Saxony-Anhalt and spoke of consequences. He also noted that he took responsibility for the election outcomes but would not resign the chancellorship or his role as chairman of the CDU party.

The question now is whether widespread dissatisfaction with Merz will continue to weaken the CDU’s prospects across Germany.

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“Why fight Russia when foreigners are invading Europe?”

• Europeans Should Overthrow Their ‘Ruling Class’ (J.B. Shurk)

War fever is ramping up again across Europe. This has happened several times in the four and a half years since Russia invaded Ukraine, usually coinciding with important national elections — particularly those in Romania, Moldova, Hungary, Poland, and Germany — when certain domestic political parties have been demonized as “pro-Putin” and “security threats” to the rest of Europe. The war drums also get loud whenever increased military budgets are being debated within the governments of the Scandinavian and Baltic states, Finland, Germany, and Poland, as well as the European Commission. The ebb and flow of political battle cries against the Russian Federation track closely with Europe’s electoral and parliamentary calendars.


It is no coincidence that the German government decided to announce five days before Saxony-Anhalt’s September 6 elections that Russia was responsible for a small drone discovered at the Leipzig/Halle Airport over a month earlier. Although the drone carried an explosive charge, the device caused no damage and sat at the airport unnoticed for many hours on August 4. When Germany accused Russia of perpetrating the “attack” four weeks later, Berlin presented no real evidence for its conclusions.

Nevertheless, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and national leaders across Europe immediately declared solidarity with Germany and condemned Russia’s “hybrid war” on “European Union soil.” To many observers, Berlin’s finger-pointing appeared timed to dampen momentum for the “Alternative for Deutschland” political party, which German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and the European Establishment have defamed as “Nazis” and “Russian puppets.” If that was Merz’s goal — to stave off election defeat for his political allies by falsely accusing his opponents of being Russian tools and spies — it did not work. The AfD decisively won the September 6 election in Saxony-Anhalt, and support for the pro-national sovereignty political party continues to surge across Germany.

Similarly contrived “national security” incidents arose before elections in Romania, Poland, Hungary, and Moldova. Pro-European Union parties accused Russia of election interference, economic sabotage, or even imminent attack, while framing opposing parties as Russian assets. In the case of Romania, the E.U.-aligned courts annulled the 2024 presidential election due to spurious allegations of “Russian meddling.”

While European politicians predictably drag out the Russian bogeyman before every election, they seem to be ratcheting up their scaremongering in anticipation of the midterm elections in the United States. President Trump has made no secret of his belief that the Russia-Ukraine War is a stupid and unnecessary conflict that would have never happened had he been in office in 2022. For two years, he has attempted to end it. With the exception of Slovakia (and Hungary before former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s electoral defeat), European governments appear committed to an expanded war with Russia in the near future.

Just last week, President Trump asked Ukraine’s holdover-president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to refrain from attacking Russian oil refineries in an effort to stabilize global markets. After agreeing to do so, Zelenskyy did just the opposite and announced Ukraine’s use of NATO-supplied missile systems to target Russian facilities, an action presumably meant to provoke Russia into targeting NATO members directly. Ominously, Ukrainian “journalist” and Zelenskyy confidant Dmytro Gordon recently announced, “Literally within days, something will happen that will give us great hope.…I can’t say what it is — it’s a military secret. But I know that in the coming days…something will happen that will give the nation wings. I know this.”

Gordon’s promise that “something will happen” seems to be an open secret throughout Europe. European Commission officials are encouraging all four-hundred-fifty million European citizens to stockpile water, food, and medicine in preparation for war. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has told the Bundestag that war is coming, and Chancellor Merz has successfully worked around prior legal limits on — and substantially increased — defense spending, while acknowledging that Germany is “already in conflict with Russia.”

Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland are expanding the size of their respective militaries and implementing broader conscription programs. French President Emmanuel Macron has reportedly informed political leaders that war with Russia has arrived, and the British government is furiously revising its war manuals, organizing civil defense exercises, and preparing for large-scale military conscription, including the activation of retired servicemembers up to the age of sixty-five. In the last week, the United Kingdom’s top ten newspapers have published over two-hundred-fifty articles about the likelihood of war with Russia.

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“Von der Leyen’s public courtship of Mark Carney says as much about Europe’s weakness as it does about Canada’s leverage..”

• Queen Ursula’s New ‘Boyfriend’ Should Make Putin Smile (Rachel Marsden)

European Commission president and unelected de facto “queen” of Europe, Ursula von der Leyen, can’t get enough of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. Her annual “State of the European Union” address last week should have been called “State of my crush on Mark Carney.” It seemed to transform into one giant excuse to gush about him while he sat in front of her, as she mused aloud to “Dear Mark” about her vision of some kind of “associate EU membership” for Canada. It reminded me of a kid back in grade school who once did an entire speech on “seals” in French class, just so he could constantly repeat the French translation of the subject, “phoques,” at a rate of once per sentence.


“President Metsola, Prime Minister Carney, Honorable Members,” she began. “Mark, your presence here is a symbol of the enduring friendship between our people. Our cultural, historical and personal links run deep within the fabric of our societies.” That’s what we used to call a group date to hide your crush. Only the group here consists of Canada’s 41 million people and the EU’s 452 million. “Dear Mark,” she continued. “I said we must urgently reimagine our partnerships… We share one ocean, one set of values, one way of seeing the world. And we will now build our shared future as well.”

Carney may be glad that ocean she speaks of is there, as it seems to be perhaps the only thing preventing her from camping out on his front lawn at this point. For his part, Carney has made it clear that he’s playing the field, and that any commitment is welcome in that context.“We’re not looking to become a member of the European Union,” Carney said, unequivocally. “What we are looking – and will begin discussions for – is a unique alliance between Canada and the European Union.” In other words, he isn’t looking to flee Trump’s 51st state threat in favor of Canada willingly being the EU’s 28th.

No one in their right mind can blame him. You have to think that Carney – the former central banker of both Canada and the UK, and the onetime head of the G20’s Financial Stability Board in Basel – knows an economic basket case when he sees one. And it’s one thing to hang out, have a good time, and fill your boots. But it’s quite another not to have the total freedom to just zip up and peace out when the next inevitable self-imposed meltdown comes along. Which is at about the rate of one a week, at this point.

A lot of the EU’s problems come down to a lack of accurate foresight and an inability to prioritize by coordinating their agenda with existential reality. Had European leaders been more adept at doing so, they might not need Carney to stand there in front of the EU Parliament and explain that it’s okay not to kiss Washington’s behind to their own detriment. Or that dating around allows for a more chill approach to all relationships.Until recently, anyone adopting this position in either Canada or Europe would immediately be subject to a proctology exam, accused of being some kind of secret tool of the Kremlin. EU officials have repeatedly warned that fragmentation and multipolarity that de-centers the Washington-led agenda hinders Western unity to the benefit of rival powers such as Russia.

But Carney is basically saying that it benefits any country to pursue strategic non-alignment. He’s cutting deals with Europe and with BRICS countries. He said to a standing ovation at Davos earlier this year that it was important to be “pragmatic in recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values. We are engaging broadly, strategically, with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait for a world we wish to be.”

This isn’t a guy who’s into nation-building beyond his own. Ursula may think that she’s acquiring Canada and its resources for Europe, but she’s also importing, first and foremost, a political instinct that the bloc has long lacked. Carney is now articulating – to resounding applause – a position that, until recently, was far more closely associated with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s worldview than the one that orbits around Washington.

Still, Carney is singing from the EU’s hymn book on Ukraine and Russia right now. He’s also literally negotiating for Canada to get some defense manufacturing revenues from the EU’s massive fear-driven spending spree on its defense security blanket. It’s not hard to see a profit motive here. Nor in the fact that he’s literally pitching for Europe to replace Russian natural resources with Canadian equivalents.

So right now, Canada and Russia are positioned as competitors on the global economic playing field. At least for the time being. But that won’t always be the case once he’s secured the bag. Carney – now officially the most popular prime minister in Canadian history at 70% approval – got himself into that position by ditching right-left ideology for pragmatism. He could turn out to be an important interlocutor for Russia with the West. Someone who’s blunt, action-oriented, and doesn’t much honestly care what you do as long as it doesn’t annoy him. Ursula is clearly smitten with Carney. And if her new boyfriend ends up showing Europe how to be a little less cliquey about engaging with the rest of the world, then perhaps there’s hope for us all yet.

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Trump as peacemaker?!

• Canada and UK Could Merge War Chests To Fight Russia (RT)


The Rockettes

Canada and the UK are considering merging two major military financing initiatives to help European NATO members and other Kiev backers finance their military buildup against Russia, the CBC reported on Wednesday, citing anonymous officials. In recent years, European NATO nations have increasingly accused Moscow of preparing an attack on members of the US-led military bloc, using the alleged threat to justify bloated military budgets. Moscow has denied any such intention.


Canada is leading plans for the Defense, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB), while the UK is pushing for the Multilateral Defense Mechanism (MDM). Both initiatives are intended to make it easier for allied states to finance military purchases and expand arms production. In July, Carney failed to entice then-UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer to join the DSRB as a founding member. However, Burnham’s government is more aligned with Canada on the issue, the CBC reported, citing an anonymous Canadian official.

Ottawa is confident the two countries will reach a deal to combine their initiatives into a joint institution, the Canadian Press reported last week, citing a senior Canadian official. So far, Ottawa’s DSRB has attracted support from Albania, Belgium, Greece, Latvia, Luxembourg, Romania, Türkiye, and Ukraine. The Netherlands, Finland, and Poland have backed the UK’s MDM. The plans come as NATO countries escalate their military spending. Last year, following pressure from US President Donald Trump, bloc members agreed to invest 5% of their GDP annually in their militaries and defense-related areas by 2035.

In the meantime, European NATO members have increasingly touted the Russian threat to militarize and prepare the continent for a potential war with Moscow, all while insulating the US from the consequences of such a conflict. “European elites… now seek to frighten their populations with a mythical Russian threat,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told journalists at a BRICS summit earlier in September, stressing that Moscow has “no grounds for any conflict with Europe.”

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Not true. He probably simply doesn’t understand.

• Trumps “Russian sanctions” Destroyed German Car Industry (Paul Craig Roberts)

German automakers announce 100,000 job cut. Germany’s largest union concludes German auto industry “faces the risk of total collapse” from the energy shortage caused by Trump’s “Russian sanctions” and war against Iran for Israel. Volkswagen’s stock price has fallen 75%. German auto plants are moving to produce armaments for Israel, indicating the Israelization of another economy.


The question naturally arises: Why did German governments sell out Germany in order to support stupid policies of the White House Fool? Meanwhile the price of diesel fuel in the US has risen 76% from one year ago. The price of Washington’s subservience to Netanyahu will continue to rise. Will Americans show their acceptance of these unnecessary costs on November 3?

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Lovin’ It?

• Check Out McDonald’s $13.5 BILLION Modernization Plan (Stephen Green)

McDonald’s has a problem — several, actually.


The worst might be how inflation eroded the company’s decades-old value proposition. The return of Value Menu items brought back some customers — but not enough — and many franchisees balked at selling items that proved to be money-losers. Maybe the weirdest is that Motley reported that tiny little rival Burger King, a chain with a perennial identity crisis/inferiority complex, is “resurgent” against the Arches.

With all that, U.S. store traffic is in the hole, the stock is down by about 22% for the year, and there are no easy outs. Or at least there aren’t any inexpensive outs. During Wednesday’s Investor’s Day, McDonald’s — when shares fell an additional 4.8% — announced a 10-year, $13.5 billion-with-a-b modernization plan to turn things around. I don’t know yet if I’m lovin’ it, but I am intrigued. Let’s take a look.

And Another Thing: McDonald’s also took the beef tallow out of the deep fryers 30-plus years ago and still refuses to put it back. And no, I’ll never shut up about how the company ruined what were once the world’s most reliably perfect French fries.

There are technical, financial aspects to the company’s “NEXT” plan. But if they bored me to near death (and they did), then it’s a sure thing you’ll be even less interested. So let’s get to the important stuff — namely, how McDonald’s thinks it can improve its food and service.

The smartest move might prove to be “Developing and rolling out new products,” as Axios put it, “including hand-breaded chicken and new protein-based items geared toward GLP-1 users.” McDonald’s nuggets were show-stoppers when the company introduced them [checks watch] 45 freakin years ago, but the competition caught up and surpassed them ages back. Any improvement would be welcome.

But focusing on GLP-1 users is brilliant, and possibly a nice way to boost margins. GLP drugs are almost certainly here to stay, but there’s more to them than just some new menu items. Targeted food items can sometimes command a price premium, which is nice for the bottom line. But GLP-1 users also have reduced appetites. So McD could shrink the portions, keep the price in line with the old value proposition, and still improve margins.

Three more items, also courtesy of Axios, with my notes in brackets:
• Modernizing stores with features like lockers for delivery and pickup. [Lovin’ this one.]
• Adopting a new AI-powered ordering system nicknamed Archy. [Inevitable; we’ll have to wait and see if it’s worthwhile.]
• Retraining millions of workers through what global chief people officer Tiffanie Boyd described as the largest upskilling effort in the brand’s history. [McDonald’s has never been Waffle House frightening, but now the company wants to aim for Chick-fil-A good. Awesome.]

Shares are up a bit today as investors have had a chance to digest yesterday’s news. But here’s where NEXT gets tricky.

McDonald’s says the improvements — I didn’t list all of them — will cost the company $5 billion through 2030, and an additional $8.5 billion through 2036. And according to one of those more technical items I thought I could spare you, Motley says corporate “has just $4.3 billion in current assets.” There’s almost certainly no way from here to 2036 without significantly more debt, and McDonald’s already has about $40 billion worth. But you know what the company could do in short order and at relatively little cost to help turn things around? That’s right: Put the tallow back in the deep fryers.

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UN=globalists.

• Milei Calls UN a Caste of Parasites, Signs a Major Deal with US (Anderson)

Argentine president Javier Milei did not hold back when speaking at the United Nations on Wednesday. As a matter of fact, he used some language that we don’t typically hear in that setting, but he was spot on. He called the UN “a useless organization that only serves to feed a caste of fatally arrogant parasites disguised as well-intentioned bureaucrats.” To its face. Well done, sir.


Milei said that while the organization’s original mission of resolving conflict peacefully and promoting freedom was noble, “today, regrettably, it is time to acknowledge that, in practice, that sacred covenant has been broken.” He cited examples like gender agenda, environmental extremism, and unchecked immigration, along with the “genocide” of COVID-19 restrictions.

During the pandemic, bodies under the auspices of this house put themselves before scientific evidence and the sovereignty of nations and promoted forced lockdown policies throughout the world. Where some allege a public health policy error, we see a global experiment in social control disguised as science. And when a state wearing public health blinkers deprives its population of the right to work, to receive an education, and to bid farewell to their dead, this results in millions of avoidable deaths. There is a word for it: genocide.

“Those who were supposed to guarantee collective security and human rights failed in their task. They allowed chaos, violence, and international terrorism to flourish,” he continued. “The alleged defenders of human rights have sheltered bloodthirsty dictatorships and regimes that stone women in the streets; they have systematically voted against Israel while remaining silent in the face of Islamic terrorism and the genocide of Christians in Africa.” He also pointed to something more personal: the lack of resolution in the Malvinas Islands sovereignty dispute between Argentina and the United Kingdom:

Fifty years ago, this same assembly adopted Resolution 3149, urging the parties to refrain from introducing unilateral changes while the dispute remained unresolved. Fifty years later, the situation has not changed. Today, the Sea Lion project is moving toward oil extraction on the Argentine continental shelf — specifically in the North Malvinas Basin — under British licenses that Argentina rejects as illegal and illegitimate.

This leads me to ask: What is the use of a resolution if, for decades, the opposing party can act in direct contradiction to it, leaving the resolution sitting in the archives, intact yet powerless against reality? There is no shortage of words or resolutions; what is missing is consequences. For an institution that fails to make its voice carry weight in actual events loses the most important thing of all: its authority,” the Argentine president accused.

That is why Malvinas is not only an issue between Argentina and the United Kingdom. It also raises a question about this organization’s ability to enforce its own resolutions. “Faced with the UN’s impotence, we made a decision,” he said, stating that Argentina would not wait for the UN or the world and would take matters into its own hands.

Among other things, Milei talked about how Argentina is aligned with the West, the United States, and Israel, and not the UN’s woke agenda. He also opposed state control of AI and said the world must embrace it, seemingly backing up Donald Trump’s thoughts on the matter. “Where many see a threat, we see a frontier,” he said. “Artificial intelligence, or superintelligence, as President Donald Trump calls it, could multiply our productivity by orders of magnitude that we still do not understand.”

He finished with his famous catchphrase “¡Viva la libertad, carajo!” or “Long live freedom, dammit.” While Milei was ripping the UN a new one, his Minister of Foreign Affairs Pablo Quirno joined U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau in signing the Andes-Atlantic Corridor, what the State Department calls a “joint initiative to strengthen and modernize infrastructure linking Argentina’s vital economic sectors to major Atlantic ports and Western markets.”

In other words, unlike the UN, they were getting stuff done. The ultimate goal of the initiative is to promote more mineral, oil, and gas exports; create a Western Hemisphere supply-chain hedge, and allow U.S. firms to become the bidders and suppliers. The State Department’s statement specifically mentions the two countries strengthening cooperation on transportation, the energy sector, the minerals sector, and the digital sector.

According to the State Department, “The Corridor will help unlock billions of dollars in investment, expand opportunities to U.S. companies, and strengthen supply chains for critical minerals and energy, including lithium, copper, oil, and gas. It is the first Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment Corridor in the Western Hemisphere, deepening U.S.-Argentine economic integration and connecting investors to opportunities across Argentina’s energy, mining, infrastructure, and technology sectors.”

It added that Milei’s economic reforms have helped create this opportunity, “which will expand economic cooperation and provide financing of up to $7 billion by 2027.”

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“Sergey Ryabkov pointed out that Moscow’s position on the matter had been set out in detail in a note recently handed to the British charge d’affaires in Russia..”

“They are risking their own security..”

• London May Become De Jure Party To Ukraine Conflict (TASS)

The United Kingdom is providing the Kiev regime with “increasingly multifaceted support and assistance,” thereby risking becoming a de jure party to the Ukraine conflict, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told reporters. According to him, by providing the Kiev regime with “unrestrained and increasingly multifaceted assistance and support,” London is directly violating “a number of legally and politically binding documents, both bilateral and multilateral.” “The UK has thereby put itself on the verge of transitioning from a de facto party to the conflict to a de jure party,” Ryabkov said.


“We are issuing the strongest possible warning to the United Kingdom about the consequences of further escalation,” he said. “They are risking their own security,” he noted. The senior diplomat pointed out that Moscow’s position on the matter had been set out in detail in a note recently handed to the British charge d’affaires in Russia. “Unfortunately, we are having great difficulty breaking through the layers of their own illusions, delusions and prejudices to explain some basic things,” he said, referring to contacts with UK counterparts.

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“Watch How Fast the Media Disappears This Story of a Black Woman Found Dead by Hanging..”

• This Story of a Black Woman Found Dead by Hanging (Tim O’Brien)

American media have certain templates for certain types of news stories. Any time a black person is found dead by hanging, the default assumption is that it was murder, it was racially motivated, the killer or killers were white men, and no one wants to talk about it… as they talk incessantly about it.


When a story like this breaks, leftists automatically jump into a time machine and, for all intents and purposes, transport themselves to a time and place where fellow Democrats wore white hoods and “lynched” black people for no other reason than that they were black. The only glitch in the leftists’ time machine is that for some reason it mistakenly changes the political affiliation of the Democrat killers to Republican. The fact is that stories like this almost never break. Or should I say they never break? And so, the left has to make them up.

Remember when black NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace had a crew member report that he found a garage-door pull rope tied in the shape of a noose? This happened on June 21, 2020, at Talladega Superspeedway. The pull cord made national news and became the center of an FBI investigation, if you can believe it. Two days later, the FBI determined that Wallace was not the target of a hate crime and that the same knotted pull rope had been in that particular garage space since the October 2019 Talladega race weekend, long before Wallace’s team was ever assigned to that space. False alarm.

This is how the news media ran with that story on the basis of absolutely no facts.


The reason stories like this gain so much traction so quickly is that the demand for this sort of racism from the left vastly outstrips supply. Not even two weeks ago, my colleague Benjamin Bartree reported on another viral story that once again proved to be based on unfounded assumptions that required leftists to ignore the actual facts involved. “Squad member Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass., she/her pronouns in bio) came out September 10 with a banger of an X post, weirdly lamenting the ‘strange fruit’ hanging from trees — presumably referencing black lynching victims based on the context — across the country and ‘demanding a federal investigation NOW so we can stop modern-day lynchings,’” Benjamin wrote. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) jumped on the bandwagon with her own take on X.


X users, through Community Notes, quickly corrected AOC and Pressley, simply by reading up on the actual deaths, something the esteemed congressional reps failed to do. What they found was that, “While the letter cites 10 hanging cases in 2026, local law enforcement and medical examiners have ruled the majority as suicides, including the cases of Juliana Nzita and Kyle Bassinga. Only one case is currently being investigated as a homicide.”

Even then, it was not clear that the one homicide under investigation was racially motivated or that it would ultimately be deemed a homicide. Once again, the demand for this sort of racism significantly exceeds the supply.So, what do you think will happen with this story out of Jackson, Miss.?

That’s where law enforcement authorities say that a black woman, eventually identified as Tasia Fortune (29), was found hanging from a tree. The horrific scene was discovered behind an abandoned home on August 3. How do you think the news media and the left reacted at first? Doesn’t this crime check all the boxes? Black woman, Mississippi, hanging.from.a.tree.

If the early years of the Southern Poverty Law Center represent your glory days, this story is a dream come true. Imagine what you can do with this. I mean the story writes itself. It had to be white men motivated by race, right? Maybe they even wore those white hoods. If you’re an aspiring leftist reporter, you get to use words and terms like “lynching,” “Jim Crow,” and “Deep South.” And you get to entertain where in your home office you’re going to hang that Pulitzer.

Except none of that was true. The actual story — you know, the truth — is that Jackson police say that so far, they’ve arrested two of three suspects in the case and both of them are black men. On Sept. 22, they arrested Earnest Lloyd Jr. (25), after earlier apprehending Jarques Ratliff (51) on allegations that they committed the crime.


According to the Associated Press (AP), police have said the accused men had some sort of “association” with Fortune, so this likely wasn’t a random crime, and the men face murder charges. AP reported that Fortune was a mother of four and a Kentucky native who had lived in Jackson for roughly 10 years prior to her death.

Christy Spivey is Fortune’s mother. She has done numerous media interviews in which she has said her daughter had hit on hard times and was often homeless. At the time of Fortune’s death, her mother had no idea where she was even living. Spivey said her daughter had been trying to turn things around and perhaps start a cleaning business before her time on earth was cut short. None of the facts in this case detract from the real tragedy involved.

And so, regardless of how this case proceeds from this point forward, the one thing we pretty well know is that, once again, the demand for this sort of racism greatly outpaces the supply. What do you think will happen to this story now? Do you think the national media will give it the same attention they were planning to give it? Or do you think they’ll drop it before that third arrest is made?

That’s what I thought, too. And we all know the reason. If leftists can’t racially demonize their intended targets, it’s not news.

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https://twitter.com/patriot_savvy/status/2102870162919587924?s=20 https://twitter.com/EricLDaugh/status/2102831014968017096?s=20

 

 

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Feb 282026
 
 February 28, 2026  Posted by at 10:25 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  118 Responses »


Keith Haring Untitled 1983


• Substitution of a Tariff for Income Tax Would Re-create Free Americans (PCR)
• Who Rules America? Not Americans. (Paul Craig Roberts)
• The Man Who Might Wreck the Country (James Howard Kunstler)
• ‘I Did Not Have Relations With That Man, Jeffrey Epstein’: Bill Clinton (ZH)
• Hillary: I Didn’t Know Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell Was An ‘Acquaintance’ (JTN)
• Hillary Deposition on Epstein Briefly Halted Due to Leaked Photograph (CTH)
• Even CNN Admits Democrats Are in Big Trouble on Immigration (Matt Margolis)
• Brutal: Democrats Walked Straight Into This (ZH)
• Jack Smith’s Secret Orders Targeting Patel and Wiles Should Alarm Us (Turley)
• What Susan Rice Really Meant by Her Retribution Threat (Victor Davis Hanson)
• Kristi Noem Says DHS Staffers Put Spyware on Her Phone and Laptop (AmG)
• Biden Admin ‘Invited’ Fani Willis To Get Lucrative Grant (HUSA)
• Paramount Wins Bidding War For Warner Bros. After Netflix Drops Out (ZH)
• Ukraine Marked This Major Shift In Global Politics (Lukyanov)
• McDonald’s Germany HIDES Food Ads During Ramadan (MN)

 


 

https://twitter.com/nicksortor/status/2027641193358594157?s=20 Elon interview Elon interview part Tucker Epstein

 


 

 


 


Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration…

He says, like Trump, but independent of Trump, that tariffs set Americans free. But who’s listening to him? After 100+ years, people can no longer think beyond income tax.

• Substitution of a Tariff for Income Tax Would Re-create Free Americans (PCR)

On February 25, I wrote on this website that the most important part of President Trump s State of the Union address was the refusal of Democrats to stand if they agreed with his statement: the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens. Actually, there is an equally important element in his address, perhaps more important, and that is President Trump’s statement that tariffs would eventually replace the system of income taxation. This is perhaps the most important sentence ever stated in a state of the union address. As far as I can tell, the only attention it received was that the Supreme Court had recently invalidated Trump s tariffs.


As I have pointed out for decades to no avail not even libertarians have noticed the income tax enacted in 1913 converted free Americans into serfs or slaves. The reason I can say this is that the historical definition of a free person is a person who owns his own labor. Serfs and slaves do not own their own labor. Serfs owed a portion of their labor to their feudal lord. Normally it did not exceed 30% of their labor. Slaves owed 50% of their labor to their owners, the other half of their labor going to their own maintenance as an effective and loyal workforce. There is no way around the fact that the historical definition of a free person is a person who owns his own labor. The land enclosures freed serfs from their obligation to feudal Lords, and created a labor market in which untaxed wages were paid to laborers for their labor. Free men appeared once they owned their own labor and sold it at market wages.

The income tax that passed in 1913 did not materially enserf or enslave Americans, because the tax rate was so low and applied to such a tiny percentage of incomes that it had no material effect. That is how they got it in place. But once in place, the income tax grew quickly, both up in the tax rate and broadly in the percentage of the population subject to income taxation. By the time of the John F Kennedy administration the tax rate on middle income Americans exceeded the tax rate on the labor of medieval serfs, and the tax rate on upper incomes exceeded the tax rate on 19th century slaves on American cotton and tobacco plantations. As the Kennedy tax rate reductions were not indexed, by the time of the Reagan administration the tax rates again exceeded those on medieval serfs and 19th century slaves.

The Reagan administration indexed the new tax rates, and this has held the appropriation of the labor of the middle class to that appropriated by feudal lords. For the upper income class, the official tax rate is higher than that on medieval serfs, but there are methods depending on the economic activities of the upper income class that keep the tax rates for some of them below that of medieval serfs. Regardless, the upper class does not own all of its own labor and is no more free than the lower class. A tariff is a tax on your purchases, not on your labor. If you purchase domestic products made from domestic resources, you do not have to pay the tariff. If you purchase imported goods or domestic goods made partially from imported products, you pay a tariff based on the content of foreign input in to the product. The purpose of tariffs is to protect domestic production from foreign competition, not as Trump uses them to bludgeon foreign countries to obey his orders.

Tariffs are in effect a consumption tax, not a tax on labor and capital. Therefore, a country with a consumption tax instead of an income tax will have higher growth and higher living standards. All of this completely obvious and correct information has been ignored in the United States since 1913, a period of 113 years. For over a century American GDP and personal incomes have been held down by the liberals and leftists who have the outlook of communists and prefer equal incomes in poverty to higher incomes with inequality.

It is extraordinary that Donald Trump, a real estate developer, understands this, but the American Economic Association is incapable, being brainwashed as it is by a century of indoctrination. When you read economists, you learn that their only concern about the income tax is that it is fair. By fair, they mean that it must fall heaviest on the higher incomes. A flat tax rate that taxes everyone at the same rate, which seems consistent with the Constitutional mandate of equal treatment under the law, is considered unfair. The fact that a tax on income means that the taxpayer has lost his freedom and now owes part of his labor to the government, the equivalent of a feudal lord or 19 century plantation owner, is beyond the comprehension of economists.

The consequence is that we will remain serfs and slaves with only a partial ownership of our own labor.

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“The flooding of its borders by many different immigrants, whose entry was facilitated rather than opposed, has turned the United States into a Tower of Babel in which there is no longer even a common language.”

• Who Rules America? Not Americans. (Paul Craig Roberts)

The Zionist American media such as NPR are blaming US Attorney General Bondi for withholding Epstein files in order to protect President Donald Trump. Here are the charges from NPR, which has no evidence except its alleged “investigation” of documents that NPR claims exist, but which NPR has not seen:“The Justice Department has withheld some Epstein files related to allegations that President Trump sexually abused a minor, an NPR investigation finds. It also removed some documents from the public database where accusations against Jeffrey Epstein also mention Trump. Some files have not been made public despite a law mandating their release. These include what appear to be more than 50 pages of FBI interviews, as well as notes from conversations with a woman who accused Trump of sexual abuse decades ago when she was a minor.” https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-s1-5723968/epstein-files-trump-accusation-maxwell


Of course, NPR’s investigatory ability is nonexistent. NPR is a propaganda institution whose agenda is to undermine traditional white America which NPR presents as racist and exploitative. NPR’s charges, like those of the rest of the whore American media that prostitutes itself to serve official narratives, seek to divert focus off investigating whether Epstein was conducting an Israeli Mossad blackmail operation in order to conform American, British, and European foreign policy in the Middle East with Israel’s. Dear reader, have you noticed that absolutely no one wants to investigate the real issue? This very fact tells you how real the issue is. Epstein’s job, for which he was well paid, was to compromise a few highly placed American, British and European officials in positions to influence American, European and British policy in the Middle East and make sure that it was aligned with Israel’s.

That is what the Epstein saga is about. It is being covered up by the US government, the British government and the European governments, all of whom support Israel’s Zionist agenda of Greater Israel. US ambassador to Israel, Huckabee, demonstrated Washington’s support for Greater Israel in his interview with Tucker Carlson when he said that Israel should just go ahead now and take the entire Middle East.mThe power Israel has over America is obvious when it is easier for President Trump to deport a foreign student in America legally present to study at an American university who dares to mention or criticize the Israeli genocide of Palestine than it is for President Trump to deport an immigrant-invader who is here illegally.

The power Israel has over America is obvious. A Christian prayer cannot be said in an American school, but the Republican legislature in Texas can be bribed to pass legislation that makes mandatory the indoctrination of American school students in Texas with Israeli religious and political propaganda. If the Zionist legislation becomes law in Texas, future Texans will grow up indoctrinated as Israelis and not as Americans. And MAGA-Americans think Republicans are our salvation. The United States of America long ago ceased to be an independent country. Indeed it is no longer even a nation. The flooding of its borders by many different immigrants, whose entry was facilitated rather than opposed, has turned the United States into a Tower of Babel in which there is no longer even a common language.

Today the United States is Israel’s military force. The United States destroys countries that are opponents to Israel’s Zionist agenda of Greater Israel, a territory that comprises in its extent the entirety of the Middle East as so many Israeli government officials have publicly made clear over and over and over. Yet it makes no impression on Americans when an Israeli minister holds up on public television for all to see a map that shows that Israel as defined by Israel is the entirety of the Middle East from the Nile to Pakistan. It never occurs to insouciant, indoctrinated American citizens that for a quarter of a century under the guise of “the War on Terror” Americans with their blood and money have been fighting to create Greater Israel for Israel. Instead of recognizing their deception, the Americans chant: “you can’t be an American if you don’t love Israel.” Unfortunately, many Americans do not understand the subservience of American domestic and foreign policy to Israel. Consequently, the United States no longer exists as an independent country. The United States exists as the puppet of Israel, and our president, Donald Trump, is the chief puppet.

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“That a government’s primary responsibility is to its citizens should not be a controversial proposition.” —Coddled Affluent Professional on X

• The Man Who Might Wreck the Country (James Howard Kunstler)

The zeitgeist is a rough beast, hard to ride as it slouches into the unknown. Our country is trying to hang on while a party of goblins vexes and needles the beast from behind, and you cannot make them stop. Sense-making gets to seem impossible. We don’t have an explanation from Senate Majority Leader John Thune as to why he will not do what is within his power to do: pass election reform, known as the SAVE Act, by changing the filibuster procedure. At midweek Sen. Thune said Republicans were “not unified on pursuing a talking filibuster.” Understand that bringing back a real filibuster, with continuous speech in the well of the Senate, only requires the Majority Leader’s say-so, meaning Mr. Thune is prevaricating, concealing the truth.


Which might be that he does not want to pass election reform. It appears he wants to set up the midterm elections with the now-familiar kit of unverifiable mail-in ballots, millions of non-citizen motor-votes, and dragged-out vote-counting so that Democrats will seize control of the House (if not the Senate) in order to crank-up the impeachment machine again and finally get rid of President Trump. It does not look like anything else, certainly not any kind of cunning game. What might change that would be an FBI analysis of the 2020 election year ballots, voter rolls, and vote tabulation tapes recently extracted from the Fulton County, Georgia, Elections Hub, leading to indictments.

They’ve had this mass of material for a month. There was already plenty of preliminary evidence of fraud from earlier investigations — which is how come U.S. Magistrate Judge Catherine Salinas of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia found probable cause to approve a search warrant for the FBI. They must have an idea by now of what the evidence shows. It’s not that complicated.There’s no fixed statutory timeline for a referral. The FBI can pass along the matter to the DOJ for prosecution whenever they determine the evidence is sufficient. Referrals are customarily secret, as they occur during ongoing investigations and involve sensitive, non-public information. DOJ policies emphasize confidentiality in pre-charging stages to protect investigations, potential witnesses, sources, and the integrity of any future prosecution.

In general, the public learns of an FBI referral only indirectly — through later developments like indictments, or news media reporting via “sources.” Criminal referrals on the Fulton County case might have already been made, and indictments might be forthcoming. That would have to prompt some kind of attitude adjustment for Senate Majority Leader Thune on behalf of election reform. It could happen at any time. It would at least put Senator Thune between a rock and a hard place. It’s well-understood that at least 80-percent of people polled want the SAVE Act passed There is no debating position that reasonably argues against it. You might have noticed that Mayor Mamdani of New York City called for volunteers to shovel snow in the latest blizzard, and that anyone who stepped-up was required to show two types of photo ID to work the job.

Yet, Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), aligns with the party’s longstanding opposition to voter ID laws, including the SAVE Act. No need to go figure on that. It’s just arrant dishonesty. The president emphasized clearly why the Democrats are against election reform in this week’s State of the Union speech: because the party can only win elections by cheating, by employing massive systematic fraud. He said it so that everybody tuned-in could hear it, and the Democrats just sat stone-faced on their side of the chamber — and that was only minutes after they refused to stand for the proposition that the government’s main job was to act in the interest of American citizens.

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It’s the picture of Bill in a dress that gets to me. That didn’t come from nowhere.

• ‘I Did Not Have Relations With That Man, Jeffrey Epstein’: Bill Clinton (ZH)

Former President Bill Clinton on Friday told lawmakers that he had no clue about crimes carried out by Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender who visited the Clinton White House at least 17 times while Bill was president, before letting Clinton fly on the ‘Lolita Express’ dozens of times. “I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong,” Clinton said in a statement prepared for a closed-door deposition in Chappaqua, New York. “I know what I saw, and more importantly, what I didn’t see.”


“My brief acquaintance with Epstein ended years before his crimes came to light, and … I never witnessed during our limited interactions any indication of what was truly going on,” said the 79-year-old former president, adding “I had no idea of the crimes Epstein was committing.” Which is weird, because Epstein had a picture of Clinton in a blue ‘Monica Lewinsky’ dress and red pedo club shoes on his wall… Clinton became the first former president forced to testify to Congress – and did so just one day after his wife, Hillary Clinton, testified before the same panel. nWhile Clinton was interviewed in a closed-door session, the GOP chairman of the committee, James Comer, said they would be asking Bill about trips he took on Epstein’s plane, and the White House visits Epstein made while Clinton was president.

Another GOP lawmaker on the panel, Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, said that Clinton would be “thoroughly asked” about pictures of him featured in the Epstein files – including one of him soaking in a jacuzzi, and another of him swimming with Ghislaine Maxwell. According to the Epoch Times, an FBI document stated that a person whose name was redacted and was not an Epstein victim reported that she was invited to an orgy with Clinton, but did not attend. Law enforcement emails said that an Epstein victim said she met Epstein through another victim who had traveled with Epstein and Clinton to Africa. Clinton flew on Epstein’s plane in 2002 and 2003, according to previously known flight logs and photographs.


He has said previously through a spokesperson that those trips involved work for the Clinton Foundation and that he never went to Epstein’s island, although he briefly went to Epstein’s home in New York and logs showed Epstein went to the White House while Clinton was president.As Bloomberg notes, ‘Clinton took several trips on Epstein’s private plane before Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to Florida state charges that included procurement of a minor to engage in prostitution. Epstein also donated $1,000 to Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and $20,000 to Hillary Clinton’s 2000 US Senate campaign. A charity controlled by Epstein contributed $25,000 to the Clintons’ private foundation.’ Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, told the BBC earlier this month that Bill was only flying on the Lolita Express “for his charitable work.”

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Why would Epstein say (paraphrased) that she was prettier in person? I’d gamble that they did meet.

• Hillary: I Didn’t Know Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell Was An ‘Acquaintance’ (JTN)

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters Thursday after her deposition to the House Oversight Committee that she told lawmakers that she did not know Jeffrey Epstein and only knew his associate Ghislaine Maxwell as an “acquaintance.” The comment is in line with what the former official has been stating since she and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, were thrust back into the spotlight over their alleged affiliations with the convicted late-sex offender. Hillary Clinton said she had not been aware of any crime that Epstein had committed and that she was confident her husband had not been aware of any crime either. Hillary Clinton also maintained that she never flew on Epstein’s jet or visited his notorious island.


“I don’t know Jeffrey Epstein. I knew Ghislaine [Maxwell] as an acquaintance,” she insisted. “I don’t know how many times I had to say I did not know Jeffrey Epstein.”Hillary Clinton also insisted that her daughter Chelsea Clinton was not particularly close to Maxwell after it was reported that Maxwell attended her wedding and vacationed with her in 2009. “She came as the plus one, the guest, of someone who was invited,” Hillary Clinton said. The former first lady additionally insisted that her husband’s relationship with Epstein ended “several years before anything about Epstein’s criminal activities came to light.” Bill Clinton is expected to testify in front of the House Oversight panel in New York on Friday. The Clintons have not been accused of any wrongdoing.

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Because it identifies her lawyer?

• Hillary Deposition on Epstein Briefly Halted Due to Leaked Photograph (CTH)

Clinton is claiming that she didn’t know Jeffrey Epstein. However, a leaked photograph of the deposition shows the author of her statement likely sitting right next to her. They paused the deposition because the picture was made public.


Apparently, Cheryl Mills is still around as Clinton’s personal lawyer.

https://twitter.com/EricSpracklen/status/2027087568852918440

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“.. for Democrats who spent the last several months convinced that immigration was finally turning into their weapon, Harry Enten threw a torrent of cold water on that pipe dream.”

• Even CNN Admits Democrats Are in Big Trouble on Immigration (Matt Margolis)

Democrats have made no secret of the fact that their closing argument for the 2026 midterms will center on affordability, but if sentiment about the economy improves, which the Trump administration is banking on, Democrats will need something else to run on. It’s obvious that Democrats have been hoping that immigration enforcement and the outrage they’ve been trying to foment over it could be that issue. After a year of wall-to-wall immigration drama dominating the news cycle, they were convinced that the public would finally recoil and punish Republicans at the ballot box.That was the bet. But that fantasy is now crashing hard into reality, as CNN’s own polling analyst just handed Democrats some brutally inconvenient news.


On Thursday morning, Harry Enten, CNN’s chief data analyst, walked through the numbers on immigration heading into the 2026 midterm cycle. It’s not good news for the Democrats. “This, I think, is so important to note,” Enten said. “After all the events in Los Angeles, after all the events in Minneapolis, after all the events of the last year on immigration, can Democrats actually take advantage on this issue?” “A look at the polling suggests actually, no, they’re in a worse position — in a worse position — than they were at this point during Donald Trump’s first term,” he said, before looking at the numbers, which showed that back in 2018, Democrats held roughly a six-point advantage when voters were asked which party they trusted more on immigration. Now, that edge has flipped, with Republicans holding the advantage instead.

“So this whole idea that Democrats are gonna be able to take advantage of the immigration issue actually doesn’t bear itself out in the polling, despite everything that’s been going on,” Enten noted. Host John Berman tried to make sense of it, and he offered that maybe voters just don’t trust Democrats to do better even if they’re uncomfortable with Trump’s approach. Enten confirmed exactly that. “They think Democrats will do a worse job on immigration than Republicans.” Think things couldn’t get worse? Try again. Trust in border security numbers was even more lopsided. Republicans held a 13-point advantage on border security back in 2018. That advantage has grown to 15 points, and honestly, I’m surprised it’s not more. So the issue Democrats thought might be softening for Republicans has, if anything, hardened further in the GOP’s favor.

“When you put it all together, you put immigration with border security and the idea that Democrats will be able to take the ball and run away on it, the polling data suggests, no, no, no, this is actually an issue that Republicans should be more comfortable running on than Democrats,” Enten said. “Democrats running on immigration may actually be to the Republicans’ advantage.” Read that last line again. Democrats campaigning on immigration could actively help Republicans. And then there’s the Biden comparison. And it really gets ugly here for the left. Yes, Trump’s approval rating on immigration has dipped from its peak. But Enten put it all in context. Biden’s approval rating on immigration at a comparable point in his presidency stood at a dismal 34%, while Trump’s stands at 45%.

That’s an 11-point gap. “You can’t just look at something in isolation. You have to compare it to the alternative. And in this particular case, when you take a look at immigration, and you compare Republicans to the alternative, Democrats, this is an issue that Republicans should really like, and President Trump should like the comparison to Joe Biden.” Among other things. In the end, for Democrats who spent the last several months convinced that immigration was finally turning into their weapon, Harry Enten threw a torrent of cold water on that pipe dream.

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“Rep. Rashida Tlaib appeared to chant “KKK” while Republicans chanted “USA!”—a moment ripe for its own ad. ”

• Brutal: Democrats Walked Straight Into This (ZH)

A new advertisement from conservative group American Sovereignty hammers Democrats for staying seated during President Trump’s State of the Union call to prioritize American citizens over illegal aliens, using footage that lays bare their priorities. The ad, which dropped Thursday, features Trump stating, “If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support: The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” Republicans rose in applause while Democrats remained glued to their seats, with overlays labeling the divide and accusing Dems of siding with “illegal immigrant criminals.” The spot cuts to Trump’s “These people are crazy” remark before closing with “Republicans are for you.”


As we highlighted in previous coverage, Democrats’ behavior during the SOTU revealed whose side they’re on—and it’s not the American people. Many boycotted the event or sat through applause for victims of illegal alien crime, exposing their allegiance to open borders over citizen safety. They doubled down afterward, with figures like Debbie Wasserman Schultz labeling the speech “absolutely revolting” for prioritizing Americans. Even more telling, Rep. Rashida Tlaib appeared to chant “KKK” while Republicans chanted “USA!”—a moment ripe for its own ad. The ad’s release comes as Republicans eye midterms, with a GOP spokesperson telling the Washington Examiner that vulnerable House Democrats should “get comfortable re-watching the moment they revealed they’re nothing more than America-hating scums who stayed glued to their seats.”

The Democrats handed Republicans a raft of campaign material just in time for the midterms. They don’t even try to hide their hate for Americans If they can’t stand for ‘protect Americans first,’ what exactly are they standing for? This ad marks the first in a seven-figure blitz targeting battleground states like North Carolina, Michigan, and Georgia, per Politico, aiming to leverage the SOTU optics for electoral gains.Trump himself called out Democrats during the speech, saying “you should be ashamed of yourself” for not standing, a moment echoed in White House criticisms and conservative commentary. As midterms loom, this footage serves as a stark reminder: Democrats’ refusal to stand for American priorities hands Republicans ammunition to rally voters against policies that put citizens last.

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“If past orders are any indication, the Patel and Wiles orders were likely based on sweeping generalities and demands for absolute secrecy. That is the signature of Jack Smith.”

• Jack Smith’s Secret Orders Targeting Patel and Wiles Should Alarm Us (Turley)

Former Special Counsel Jack Smith has long operated under Oscar Wilde’s rule that “the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” Over the last few months, the public has learned of a wide array of secret orders targeting members of Congress, Trump allies, and others. Now, the Administration has learned that FBI Director Kash Patel and White House Susie Wiles were also targeted by Smith in 2022 and 2023 when they were private citizens. Smith was a controversial choice as Special Counsel because of his history of excessive legal arguments and tactics, including his unanimous loss before the Supreme Court in tossing out the conviction of former Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell.


His tendency to stretch the law to the breaking point also did not play well with juries in high-profile cases, as in his case against John Edwards, which ended in acquittal. Despite such criticisms, Smith immediately returned to his past pattern of tossing aside any restraint or caution. Even Democrats this year expressed objections to his targeting of Republican members of Congress, including former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Smith told carriers not to tell members of Congress that their calls were being seized. Not only did such records reveal potentially confidential sources, ranging from journalists to whistleblowers, but Smith’s gag order prevented Congress from responding to check the abusive demand.

accounts of the orders contained equally disturbed elements. Reuters reported that “in 2023, the FBI recorded a phone call between Wiles and her attorney, according to two FBI officials. Wiles’ attorney was aware that the call was being recorded, and consented to it, but Susie Wiles was not.” It is astonishing to hear of a lawyer agreeing to the FBI recording of an attorney-client meeting as a general matter. However, to do so without informing your counsel would be a breathtaking invasion of such protected communications. There is much we still do not know.

its face, these orders appear consistent with the earlier abusive demands. Smith had virtually no basis for targeting Republican members and Trump allies. It was a fishing expedition in which Smith simply compiled lists of every well-known ally of President Trump.There are also concerns over the response to this controversy. There are reports of 10 FBI employees being fired. Agents often carry out the orders of superiors in such investigations. The Administration should assure the public that these agents were afforded due process before being ousted due to their work on orders. The recently disclosed files from these investigations are an indictment of Smith himself. He was given a historic mandate to investigate a former president.

than exercise a modicum of restraint to show the public that this was not a partisan effort, Smith yielded to his worst temptations in targeting a long list of Republicans. In his prior testimony, Smith offered little to justify these orders beyond a shrug that such secret orders routinely occur. However, he was targeting a “who’s who” listing of top political opponents to President Biden and the Democrats.To make matters worse, Smith struggled to release damaging information (and even schedule a trial) on the very eve of the 2024 presidential election. Every action that Smith only magnified his agenda to influence the election. He became a prosecutor consumed by his antagonism toward Trump and his unchecked power.

was sacred for Smith. His demands in the investigation from the courts included a wholesale attack on free speech values. Ultimately, these files are not only an indictment of Jack Smith but also of former Attorney General Merrick Garland, who failed to exercise his authority to oversee Smith and protect core constitutional values.It is essential that Congress and the Administration fully investigate Smith’s surveillance demands. Smith has long demanded accountability for others while evading such accountability for his own actions. If past orders are any indication, the Patel and Wiles orders were likely based on sweeping generalities and demands for absolute secrecy. That is the signature of Jack Smith.

Indeed, Smith appears to have replicated his increasingly infamous record with the collapse of two high-profile cases and lingering questions over his judgment and actions. He has again yielded to his temptations, and the public has paid the price.

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“We’re going to come back. People don’t like Trump. It’s our turn to come back. We’re not going to play by the old rules. No, no, no. We’re going to be tough. You better get your … ”

• What Susan Rice Really Meant by Her Retribution Threat (Victor Davis Hanson)

Susan Rice, the former U.N. ambassador under the Obama administration, national security adviser, and also served in various capacities with former President Joe Biden, gave an interview on a podcast with Preet Bharara. He is that very liberal federal prosecutor that developed quite a name for himself in New York, going after, I think, targeted a lot of people based on their politics. But nonetheless, it was one of the strangest interviews because she flat out, candidly, with no reservations, sent a message to people who were conservative, Republican, or Trump supporters, and she used “Game of Thrones” imagery. “You’ve taken the need of [President] Donald Trump. You have allowed him to bully you.”


She was talking about the so-called elites in the academic world, in the corporate world, in the institutional world. “And we’re not going to forget,” she says, “that you did that. And you better have your documents ready because when we come back into power, we’re going to … ” And the implication was: take you to court, make you pay, shake you.I don’t know what she was talking about, but it was a direct threat.But here’s what’s strange about it: Start with Susan Rice herself. If you look back through her latter years with the Obama administration, it was nothing but a complete disaster. She was the one that, you remember, that the CIA and the Obama administration wheeled out on a Sunday afternoon to explain the Benghazi attack that killed the four Americans at the annex and the consulate.

Five times she told the American people that those attacks were spontaneous, and they were because of some right-wing Coptic video maker who caused it all. That was not true. That was a preplanned, either an al-Qaeda or ISIS or some type of radical Islamic preplanned assault. People knew what they were doing. They were well armed. They were well organized. Why did she go out five times and mislead the American people? Because the Obama administration had been warned prior that their security was too lax and they did not want to give the impression that that attack was preventable, which it was. She was the one that also assured us, Americans, that when former President Barack Obama issued those red lines and said if Bashar al-Assad and his Syrian forces move WMD around or still have it, that’s going to be intolerable, i.e., I’m going to take it out.

When they didn’t do that and they backed out, and we knew they had it, she lied to the American people and said, essentially, that they no longer had WMD.Remember also she wrote, just wrapping up her career, she wrote a little memo to herself in the last weeks of the Obama administration about Michael Flynn. She went to a meeting, and it was pretty clear in that meeting they had planned to subvert the incoming administration with the false narrative of Russian collusion and that somehow Mike Flynn, the national security adviser-designate, had been colluding with the Russians, but that was not true.

But then she wrote a fake memo to herself suggesting that they hadn’t really done that, that it was all up and up. And then, of course, she and others had requested the unmasking of people related with Trump in otherwise confidential files. So, she doesn’t have a good record. That’s why she didn’t have a high-profile position in the Biden administration.But there is also some real problems with what she said. She never said to corporate America, to the academic world, to the institutional world, to the political world what they had done wrong. She just said, “We’re going to come back. People don’t like Trump. It’s our turn to come back. We’re not going to play by the old rules. No, no, no. We’re going to be tough. You better get your … ”

Well, what had they done? What had they done? If she’s implying they let people off, or they laid people off that were associated with DEI, that was in accordance with the Supreme Court ruling barring race-based preferences in academic life. If she means that Donald Trump does not have the authority to issue an executive order stopping DEI, the whole idea of executive orders goes back to the beginning, almost to the republic. But more importantly, Barack Obama was the one who said, “I have a pen and I have a phone and I’m going to use it.” And that’s when he lost control of Congress and he issued, up until that time, almost the greatest number of executive orders. So, if she’s not going to tell us that anybody committed a felony or misdemeanor, and yet she’s going to punish them, that doesn’t sound too legitimate..

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“They helped me identify that some of my own employees in my department had downloaded software on my phone and my laptop to spy on me to record our meetings..”

• Kristi Noem Says DHS Staffers Put Spyware on Her Phone and Laptop (AmG)

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem revealed on Thursday that certain DHS staffers had allegedly installed spyware on her phone and computer, as well as on devices belonging to other political appointees. “You wouldn’t even believe what I’ve found since I’ve been in this department,” Noem told conservative podcaster Patrick Bet-David . Noem said she discovered the spyware last year with the assistance of former DOGE chief Elon Musk and his team. “They helped me identify that some of my own employees in my department had downloaded software on my phone and my laptop to spy on me to record our meetings,” Noem said. Bet-David was flabbergasted by the bombshell revelation. Stop it!” he exclaimed. Wow!” “They had done that to several of the politicals,” Noem added.


The DHS Sec. said that if it wasn’t for Musk’s technology experts, there would probably still be spyware on DHS laptops and phones. Noem also disclosed that a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) was just recently discovered containing files “no one knew existed.” “An employee walked by a door and wondered what it was and started asking questions,” she explained, adding that when Trump officials went inside to check it out, they found “individuals working there that had secret files that nobody knew about” on controversial topics.mnNoem told Bet-David that the secret files were turned over to attorneys for review.

The secretary went on to say she has seen “eye-opening” data from Customs and Border Protection (CPB) and the National Laboratories regarding the scientists who traveled to the infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology in China to conduct gain of function experiments on coronaviruses. “It was eye-opening,” she said. The FBI and Department of Energy (DOE) have determined with moderate/low confidence that COVID-19 leaked from the Wuhan lab. Noem told Bet-David that she never doubted that the “deep state” (entrenched liberal resistance within the bureaucracy) existed, but never would have guessed that it was a bad as it is. “I’m still every day trying to dig out people who don’t love America, not just in this department, but throughout the federal government,” she said.

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“The $2 million award was part of roughly $18 million the Biden DOJ provided to Willis’s office between 2021 and 2024.”

• Biden Admin ‘Invited’ Fani Willis To Get Lucrative Grant (HUSA)

The DOJ under the Biden administration “invited” disgraced Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to apply for a generous taxpayer-funded grant as she prosecuted President Donald Trump. The arrangement came to light after Willis referenced the grant in December 2022 correspondence with DOJ Senior Advisor Scott Pestridge of the Office of Justice Programs. The document was first revealed on Thursday by Just the News through open records requests filed by the outlet and nonprofit America First Legal. According to Just the News, Willis referenced the Office of Justice Programs’ Community-Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative grant, which ultimately awarded her office $2 million.


The timing of the award coincided with her office’s aggressive prosecution of Trump, who at the time was running for president against then-President Joe Biden. m“I want to document your recognition of our progress and services provided with dynamic partners, as we complete sole source steps for our new grant award, a grant in which you invited us to apply,” Willis wrote to Pestridge, according to Just the News. Willis described the award as a “sole source” grant, indicating her office faced no competing applicants.The $2 million award was part of roughly $18 million the Biden DOJ provided to Willis’s office between 2021 and 2024. She claimed the funds would help “at-risk” youth avoid falling into crime or assist with reintegration into society, according to Just the News.

Documents released by Willis’s office in response to open records requests show her office maintained consistent coordination with the DOJ after Trump left office in 2021, when she became one of several left-leaning prosecutors pursuing cases against him. She later charged Trump under Georgia’s RICO statute, accusing him of attempting to subvert the 2020 election results in the state. Her case ultimately unraveled after it was revealed that she had engaged in an affair with Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor she selected to lead the prosecution. Willis took vacations with Wade while her office paid him, later claiming she reimbursed him in cash, though she never produced receipts to substantiate those payments. Both Wade and Willis were ultimately disqualified from leading the case. After Trump returned to office in 2025, the prosecution was effectively nullified.

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Big changes. Larry Ellison is anything but woke.

• Paramount Wins Bidding War For Warner Bros. After Netflix Drops Out (ZH)

Late on Wednesday, we highlighted an aggressive options trade where a call spread buyer in Netflix options had bet $14 million that Paramount would end up buying Warner Brothers after Netflix walks, something which Polymarket had indicated very much since the start of this particular M&A saga…


… and 24 hours that unknown trader is richer by about $40 million (and a guaranteed visit by the SEC), because late on Thursday, Paramount emerged victorious in the fight to buy Warner Bros. Discovery after Netflix said it wouldn’t match the David Ellison-led company’s latest offer for the iconic Hollywood property. The news sent Netflix shares soaring 10% after hours, demonstrating what the market thought of the deal (not to mention $2.8 billion breakup fee). With the winds of political change shifting, and the DOJ making it very clear that it preferred Paramount to end up the winner in the contested race, Netflix – which would have had to move regulatory mountains to complete the deal – pulled the plug on its deal soon after the Warner board of directors said it determined Paramount’s $31-per-share offer for the entire company was superior to Netflix’s bid for Warner’s movie and television studios and HBO Max streaming service.

“We’ve always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match,” Netflix Co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said in a statement. “This transaction was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price,” the pair said. Assuming regulators approve, and they will, Paramount will own not only Warner Bros. and HBO, but also many popular cable networks including the nevertrump collective known as CNN, TNT, TBS and Food Network. The deal would represent a major ground shift for the entertainment industry, which is trying to adapt to seismic shifts in audience habits and technology. “

Once our Board votes to adopt the Paramount merger agreement, it will create tremendous value for our shareholders,” said Warner Discovery Chief Executive David Zaslav. As the WSJ notes, the culmination of the months-long process marks a stunning come-from-behind win for Paramount, whose overtures had previously been rebuffed at every turn by Warner. After multiple unsolicited bids from Paramount last year, Warner opened a sale process that ended with Netflix as the winning suitor. Netflix in December signed a deal to buy Warner’s studios and HBO Max for $27.75 a share, or $72 billion. Of course, anyone who had been paying attention, and sensed which way the political winds blow, would have known the outcome as far back as December.

Shortly after, Paramount launched a hostile takeover effort, going directly to shareholders with a $30-per-share bid for the whole company, including the cable networks Netflix didn’t want. When Ellison’s Skydance Media acquired control of Paramount last August, going after Warner became his top priority. Paramount was seen as too small to compete against deep-pocketed giants such as Disney, Netflix and Amazon. Since announcing its deal with Warner, Wall Street has punished Netflix stock which lost over $170 billion in market value since last September, when Netflix was first seen – by those who don’t know how to read online betting markets – as a potential bidder for Warner, through this past week.


But then earlier this week, Paramount submitted its revised bid of $31 a share, or about $81 billion, just around the time Trump’s DOJ started sniffing around Netflix’s business model. The offer included an increased $7 billion termination fee that Paramount would pay if the transaction failed to close due to regulatory concerns. Paramount said it would foot the bill for the $2.8 billion breakup fee Warner would owe Netflix. Additionally, Paramount accelerated the timing of its proposed “ticking fee” of 25 cents per share, which it would pay to Warner shareholders for each quarter its deal hasn’t closed, to start after Sept. 30 instead of in January.

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Ukraine is where Russis woke up.

• Ukraine Marked This Major Shift In Global Politics (Lukyanov)

Four years ago, Russia’s decision to launch a military operation in Ukraine stunned almost everyone, including supporters and critics alike. Few believed Moscow would take such a drastic step. For decades, the prevailing assumption in global politics had been that force was no longer a legitimate way to resolve disputes. When military action did occur, it was wrapped in euphemisms such as humanitarian intervention and the defense of human rights. In practice, this meant that military power was considered acceptable only when used to reinforce the existing international order, the liberal world order, and therefore only by its architects, above all the United States. Russia broke that rule.


The operation in Ukraine was the culmination of contradictions that emerged after the Cold War. Moscow had long opposed NATO’s eastward expansion and the systematic dismissal of its security concerns. These objections were formally laid out in the Russian Foreign Ministry’s memorandum of December 2021, which called for a revision of the principles underpinning European security since 1990. This was also an implicit admission of failure. Russia had been unable, through diplomacy alone, to secure respect for its interests. The previous model of relations with the West had reached its end. Any new model would require a fundamental reordering of the international system, just as East-West relations once shaped the entire global structure during the Cold War. Ukraine, for reasons both historical and geopolitical, found itself at the center of this

Four years on, Russia’s immediate objectives have not been fully achieved. The operation has lasted far longer than anyone anticipated. Yet the world itself has undeniably changed. The Ukraine conflict did not cause these changes, but it accelerated processes already underway. Russia’s actions demonstrated something many suspected but few dared to test: Western power has limits. Despite dire warnings from Washington, most countries outside the US alliance system refused to join punitive measures against Moscow. They chose their own interests instead. This came as a shock to the Biden administration, which attempted to revive a Cold War framework of “free world versus tyranny.” That effort failed. The problem was not rhetoric, but reality.

Many states important to the US neither met the criteria of the so-called “free world” nor showed any enthusiasm for pretending they did. As Western pressure failed to halt Russia’s campaign, perceptions of a broader crisis in global authority only deepened. By 2023-24, Moscow had reinforced an alternative vision of international cooperation, notably through BRICS and similar groupings. These were not ideological alliances, but pragmatic ones. Serving as signs of a world increasingly organized around choice rather than loyalty.The real turning point came with the change of administration in Washington. The liberal world order was no longer treated as a sacred structure to be preserved, but as an obstacle to American national interests.

US dominance remained the goal, but it was redefined in bluntly transactional terms: securing material advantages and extracting value wherever possible. Where the Biden administration sought to maintain the old system, albeit unsuccessfully, the Trump administration speaks openly about restoring Western power without the institutions or courtesies that once accompanied it. At the Munich Security Conference this year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that Americans are “not interested in polite managed decline of the West.” The message was clear. The US has entered a struggle for a new division of the world, and intends to act while its accumulated advantages still give it leverage

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As an ad campaign, pretty brilliant. But Germany is NOT a muslim country. Europe has been Christian for 2000 years. Europeans should honor and respect their ancestors a lot moe than they do at present. Europeans are losing their identity and indeed themselves. And they don’t even see it. They just let islam take their countries.

• McDonald’s Germany HIDES Food Ads During Ramadan (MN)

McDonald’s latest marketing stunt in Germany syncs billboards to show empty packaging by day and full meals only after sunset, drawing backlash for prioritizing a minority’s religious observance over the broader customer base. As Ramadan unfolds, McDonald’s Germany has rolled out a campaign that effectively erases tempting food visuals from digital billboards during fasting hours, a move seen by critics as yet another concession to cultural shifts driven by mass immigration.The fast food chain’s digital out-of-home posters display empty fries containers and burger boxes throughout the day, filling them with food images precisely at sunset when Muslims break their fast.

https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/2026686539888001397

According to Newsweek, the ads carry the message “Happy Ramadan” and use sun-synced data tied to local prayer times to trigger the switch from empty to full.

The post sparked sharp reactions online. One user remarked: “What a great way to ignore the majority of your customers ????” Another called it: “This is a sign that your country has been conquered without a shot fired.” A third questioned: “Great idea if you are in the Middle East. What about the non-Muslims? Or do we not count any more?”This campaign echoes recent events underscoring tensions around cultural accommodation in the West. Just days ago, videos of thousands of Muslims gathering for Ramadan prayers in New York City’s Times Square went viral, with observers labeling it a “disturbing display” amid chants of “Allahu Akbar.” Professor Gad Saad quipped sarcastically: “What’s the big deal!? Just a bunch of pious men praying to Allah. I’m sure that it will all work out.”

That incident is tied to broader controversies, including Rep. Randy Fine’s response to activist Nerdeen Kiswani’s claim that dogs are “unclean.” Fine announced the “Protecting Puppies from Sharia Act,” aimed at withholding federal funds from areas banning dogs as pets, highlighting concerns over cultural shifts in regions with expanding Muslim communities. Across the Atlantic, a similar dynamic played out in London, where a Metropolitan Police officer defended a Christian preacher’s right to free speech against an angry crowd in Whitechapel, declaring: “In this country, we have freedom of speech.” She added: “I understand that you guys don’t want to hear it, so I would just recommend that you walk away and don’t listen to him. He’s not in your home.”

The episode raised questions about inconsistent policing, contrasting with past arrests of preachers like Pastor John Sherwood for expressing biblical views on family. These developments paint a picture of Western institutions—from corporations to law enforcement—yielding ground to avoid offense, often at the expense of longstanding traditions and majority norms. In Germany, home to millions of Muslim residents following waves of migration, such gestures risk alienating the wider public while fueling debates over integration. As globalism pushes for unchecked diversity, moves like McDonald’s billboard tweak serve as reminders that true coexistence demands mutual respect, not one-sided surrender. Defending core Western values remains essential to preserve the freedoms that built these societie

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Jennings AI Pipelines https://twitter.com/DD_Geopolitics/status/2027386792878444921?s=20 Glenn Beck

 

 

 

 

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